“Le Premier Cadre”: Theatre Architecture and Objects of Knowledge in Eighteenth- Century France

by

Pannill Camp

B.A., University of Puget Sound, 1999

A.M., Brown University, 2001

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for

the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of

Theatre, Speech and Dance at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

May 2009

ii

© Copyright 2009 by Pannill Camp

iii

This dissertation by Pannill Camp is accepted in its present form by the Department of

Theatre, Speech, and Dance as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in Theatre and Performance Studies.

______Date Spencer Golub, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

______Date Rebecca Schneider, Reader

______Date Jeffrey Ravel, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

______Date Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School

iv VITA

Pannill Camp was born in Austin, Texas in 1977 and grew up in Aurora,

Colorado, where he graduated from Overland High School in 1995. He studied English and Theatre at the University of Puget Sound, graduating with a B.A. degree in English

Writing, Rhetoric, and Culture in 1999. Pannill began pursuing a master’s degree that year in theatre studies at Brown University, which he completed in 2001. During the course of his studies for this degree he directed The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen at

Brown’s Production Workshop and Mac Wellman’s Dracula on the theatre department’s mainstage, for which productions he was awarded the Weston Award for Theatre

Directing in 2001.

After spending a year living and working in New York City and a year creating

English language instruction materials for the Spanish Army in Madrid, Pannill returned to Providence in 2003 to begin work on his doctorate in theatre and performance studies in the Ph.D. program that commenced the previous year as part of the Brown/Trinity

Repertory Company Consortium. His research during the early years of his doctoral studies focused on problems related to the application of Husserlian phenomenology to theatre and performance criticism. His article, “The Trouble with Phenomenology,” appeared in the fall 2004 edition of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. While working on this article, Pannill became interested in the use of figures of theatrical staging in 20th century philosophy and began to study the history of such invocations of theatre. He wrote an article entitled “Theatre Optics: Enlightenment Theatre Architecture in France and the Architectonics of Husserl’s Phenomenology,” that drew links between

v his research on phenomenology and theatre architecture reform. This essay was published by Theatre Journal in late 2007. He spent the 2006-07 academic year in Paris, conducting archival research and attending Professor Pierre Frantz’ seminars on eighteenth-century theatre at the Sorbonne-Paris IV. For academic year 2007-08, Pannill received a dissertation completion fellowship from Brown University’s Cogut Center for the Humanities.

While working toward his doctorate, Pannill served as a teaching assistant for the theatre history course cycle, and designed and taught the first theatre history course for acting and directing M.F.A. students in the Brown/Trinity Consortium. He has also taught English to officers and soldiers in the Spanish Army, and test preparation classes for Kaplan in New York and Providence. In 2004, he directed August Strindberg’s The

Father at Brown’s Production Workshop, and in 2003-04 was David Henry Hwang’s research assistant for his play Yellow Face.

vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is with distinct joy that I recall the many individuals who have helped me bring this project to completion—and have pointed the way to the work that will go into its future incarnations. First and foremost, I wish to acknowledge the guidance of Spencer

Golub, who as my qualifying examination committee chair and dissertation advisor was a steady source of encouragement, sage counsel, and high standards as well as a reminder of the virtues of hard work and intellectual fearlessness. Rebecca Schneider, since I started down the path of inquiry that led me to this project, has vigorously engaged my early, not-yet-coherent questions and helped me frame my ideas in a range of critical vocabularies. She has unfailingly emboldened me to expand upon my ideas and pointed out theoretical blindspots I took too long to see myself. Jeffrey S. Ravel generously agreed to be a reader for this thesis in 2006, and went on to point out crucial resources and dispense invaluable knowledge about Parisian archives without which my research would have been much impeded.

Beyond the members of my committee, I have benefited from instruction, inquiry, advice and moral support bestowed by a number of the faculty of Brown University, where I first began graduate study in 1999. Don B. Wilmeth championed my early attempts to write theatre history and instilled in me an appreciation for the work required of serious historians. John Emigh, whose intellectual generosity is astounding, has taught me more than I can attempt to describe in this space. During the course of my research and writing, Patricia Ybarra has offered both insights grounded in historiographical sophistication and considered editorial advice. I am grateful for the instruction, advice,

vii mentorship and interlocution I’ve received from Pierre Saint-Amand, Virginia Krause,

Nancy Armstrong, William O. Beeman, and Rey Chow. After years of financial support from the Graduate School at Brown, I was the fortunate recipient of fellowship support from the Cogut Center for the Humanities during the 2007-2008 academic year, which allowed me the time needed to finish this project and the opportunity to share my work with a generous and brilliant group of peers. In particular, I would like to express my gratitude to Michael Steinburg, Nauman Naqvi, Michael Rohlf, Rob Newcomb and Amy

Vegari for their comments and comradeship during this past year.

In addition to the debt I owe these members of the Brown community, I must thank Professors Michal Kobialka and Joe Roach, who each provided guidance and encouragement while this project was in its infancy. In Paris, Pierre Frantz allowed me to attend his vibrant seminars on eighteenth-century theatre and dramatic literature at the

Sorbonne. He and Michèle Sajous D’Oria kindly encouraged my research into theatre architecture when my French and my archival skills were sorely in need of development.

A special note of gratitude must be sounded here for Daniel Rabreau, whose doctoral thesis I had the pleasure of reading in the Sorbonne archive. Professor Rabreau’s dissertation proved an indespensible guide to archival documents related to theatre architecture, which are widely distributed around Paris and other municipal archives. It would have been impossible to conduct sufficient research for my thesis during my time in France without this aid, and Professor Rabreau’s encouraging response to my explanation of my work has sustained me since I met him in early 2007.

My research, thinking and writing has been enriched during the past five years by a cherished group of fellow graduate students at Brown, many of whom have generously

viii lent their talents directly to helping me complete the present work. Katie Chenoweth reviewed and helped improve my translations of French, while Eric Parks and Benedetta

Gennaro provided translations of texts in Latin and Italian respectively. This work has also profited from the bibliographic suggestions, careful editing and lively interrogation of Christine Mok, Amanda Lahikainen, Paige McGinley, Elise Morrison, Christine

Evans, Ken Prestininzi and Charles Mulekwa. I have been blessed to be part of a group of such generous, creative and smart colleagues.

I finally wish to thank my mother Vicki Camp and my sister Melissa Camp for their support and patience as I pursued my graduate studies, as well as John Pannill Camp

Jr., who would have been pleased to see my studies conclude. Sic transit gloria theatri.

ix TABLE OF CONTENTS

Vita ...... iv

Acknowledgements ...... vi

Abbreviations ...... x

List of Illustrations ...... xi

Introduction...... 1

Chapter 1 The Reformulation of the Theatrical Frame in French Dramatic Theory, 1657-1773...... 14

Chapter 2 Experimental Physics Lecture Demonstrations and the Architecture of Expérience in Enlightenment France ...... 76

Chapter 3 The Architectural Construction of Spectatorial Function in France, 1748-1785 ...... 123

Chapter 4 Optics and Representations of Stage Space in Eighteenth-Century French Theater Design...... 200

Epilogue ...... 248

Illustrations...... 258

Bibliography ...... 298

x ABBREVIATIONS

AN Archives Nationales, Paris

BHVP Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris

BNF ARS. Bibliothèque Nationale, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris

BNF EST. Bibliothèque Nationale, Départemente des Estampes, Paris

BNF MNS. Bibliothèque Nationale, Départemente des Manuscrit, Paris

BNF SPE. Bibliothèque Nationale, Département des Arts du Spectacle, Paris

E Denis Diderot, Entretiens sur le fils naturel. Œuvres completes. Vol. X (Hermann, 1975)

EBA École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris

PD Denis Diderot, De la poésie dramatique, Œuvres completes. Vol. X (Hermann, 1975)

xi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

0.1 Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Coup d’œil du théâtre de Besançon, ca. 1784, engraving. Published in L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des mœurs et de la legislation, BNF EST. HA-MAT 1

2.1 Plan of the Théâtre de Nicolet, ca. 1821, engraving. Published in Donnet, Architectonographie des Théâtres

2.2 Elevation of the Théâtre de Nicolet, ca. 1821, engraving. Published in Donnet, Architectonographie des Théâtres

2.3 Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Le cours du chimiste Sage à la Monnaie, 1779, drawing. Published in Émile Dacier, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin: Peintre, Dessinateur et Graveur (1724-1780). Tome 2. Paris and Brussels: G. Van Oest, 1929, pl. XIV

2.4 Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Louis XVI posant la première pierre de l’amphitheatre des Écoles de Chirurgie, 1774, drawing. Published in Émile Dacier, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin: Peintre, Dessinateur et Graveur (1724-1780). Tome 2. Paris and Brussels: G. Van Oest, 1929, pl. XVII

2.5 Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Le Charlatan, ca. 1760, etching. Published in Victor Carlson, Ellen D’Oench, and Richard S. Field, Prints and Drawings by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin 1724-1780. Middleton, Conn.: 1975, 58

2.6 Frontispiece of Essai sur l’électricité des corps, 1746, engraving. Published in Jean Antoine Nollet, Essai sur l’electricité des corps. Paris: H.L. Guerin & L.F. Delatour, 1754, Brown University Hay History of Science Collection

2.7 Frontispiece of Leçons de Physique, 1764, engraving. Published in Jean Antoine Nollet, Leçons de physique expérimentale. Paris: H.L. Guerin & L.F. Delatour, 1764, Brown University Hay History of Science Collection

2.8 École Polytechnique coupe et elevation, 1850, drawing. Archive of the École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France

2.9 École Impériale Polytechnique, 1861, photograph. Archive of the École Polytechnique, XIIb 54

3.1 André Jacob Roubo, Plan et coupe de l’ancienne Comédie Françoise, detail, 1777, engraving. Published in Roubo 1777, Pl. II

xii 3.2 Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont, Plan du Théâtre Royal de Turin attaché au Palais du Roy, 1774, engraving. Published in Dumont 1774

3.3 Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont, Plan du Théâtre de Vicenze, du dessein d’André Palladio, 1774, engraving. Published in Dumont 1774

3.4 Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont, Plan des Premières Loges du Théâtre de Lyon, 1774, engraving. Published in Dumont 1774

3.5 Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont, Dévélopement des Principales Parties de l’Intérieur du Théâtre de Lyon, 1774, engraving. Published in Dumont 1774

3.6 Francesco Milizia, Pianta del primo piano sopra Portici, 1771, engraving. Published in Milizia 1771, Tav. III

3.7 André Jacob Roubo, Plan au premier étage, detail, 1777, engraving. Published in Roubo 1777, Pl. II

3.8 Partie du Batimens des Tuileries, ca. 1770, architectural drawing showing Salle des machines with Soufflot’s temporary opera project of 1763. AN O1 1648

3.9 Pierre-Louis Moreau-Desproux, Salle de’l’Opera, Plan du théâtre et des Premieres Loges, 1774, engraving. Published in Dumont 1774

3.10 N.M. Potain, Salle de Spectacle, Coupe sur la ligne AB (transverse elevation), 1763. EBA 1840

3.11 N.M. Potain, Salle de Spectacle, Plan des Premieres Loges, 1763. EBA 1837

3.12 C.N. Cochin, Plan d’une Salle de Spectacle, 1765. Published in Cochin 1765, Pl. I

3.13 C.N. Cochin, Coupe de la Salle de Spectacle sur le grand Diametre, Presentant le fond de la Salle, 1765. Published in Cochin 1765, Pl. II

3.14 Chevalier de Chaumont, Plan de la Salle d’Opera, 1766. Published in Chaumont 1766, Pl. II

3.15 C.N. Cochin, Coupe de la Salle de Spectacle sur le petit Diametre, detail, 1765. Published in Cochin 1765, Pl. III

3.16 Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont, Vüe Perspective de la Méchanique, Et Construction d’un Interieur de Théâtre, 1774. Published in Dumont 1774

xiii

3.17 Pierre Patte, Plan d’un Théâtre suivant les principes de l’Optique et de l’Acoustique, 1782. Published in Patte 1782, fig. VII

4.1 René Descartes, diagram illustrating the crossing of visual rays within the eye, 1637. Published in La Dioptrique, 1637. Brown University Hay Lownes collection

4.2 George Berkeley, diagram of optical rays, 1709. Published in An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision, Berkeley 1709. Brown University Hay Lownes Collection

4.3 Voltaire, diagram of optical rays, 1738. Published in Éléments de la philosophie de Newton, Voltaire 1738

4.4 Charles De Wailly and Marie-Joseph Peyre, Plan General d’une Salle de Spectacle pour la Comédie Françoise projetée sur le terrain de L’hôtel de Condé (first project), 1769, ink and watercolor. AN O1 846

4.5 Charles De Wailly and Marie-Joseph Peyre, Projet de la nouvelle salle de Comédie Françoise sur le terrein de L’hotel de Condé (second project), 1770, ink and watercolor. AN O1 846 (40)

4.6 Charles De Wailly and Marie-Joseph Peyre, Proportions de la Nouvelle Salle de Comédie (third project, or variant B of second project per D. Rabreau), 1771, engraving. BHVP B1170 (5)

4.7 Charles De Wailly and Marie-Joseph Peyre, Coupe en face du Théâtre (third project, or variant B of second project per D. Rabreau), 1771. Published in supplement to Encyclopédie méthodique, “Théâtres,” Fig. 1

4.8 Charles De Wailly and Marie-Joseph Peyre, Coupe sur la Longueur de La Salle (first project), 1769, ink and watercolor. AN O1 846 (41)

4.9 Charles De Wailly and Marie-Joseph Peyre, Élévation du coté de L’Entrée (second project) 1770, ink and watercolor. AN O1 846

4.10 Gilles-Marie Oppenord, Plan au Rez de Chaussée du Théâtre Lirique, 1734, architectural drawing. EBA O 1746

4.11 Johannes Kepler, diagram illustrating the relationship between the distance of a visible object and the breadth of the visual rays cast onto the back of the eye, 1604. Ad Vitellionem paralipomena, 1604. Brown University Hay Lownes Collection

xiv 4.12 Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, plan of the fourth loges of design for a theatre at Marseilles with sightline study. Published in Ramee 1847

4.13 Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, plan of Besançon theatre showing three-part division of the stage. BNF EST. HA-MAT 1

1 INTRODUCTION

In an essay published in 1804 alongside plans for his theatre project at Besançon, the architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux mused on the representational function of visual, painterly, and theatrical frames:

On inscrit, dans un carré, dans un ovale, dans un cercle le portrait de la femme que l'on aime. On ne s'éloigne pas du principe en adoptant les formes que la nature commande. Le premier cadre fut sans doute celui que vous voyez; il reçoit les divines influences que embrâsent nos sens, et répercute les mondes qui nous environnent. C'est lui que compose tous les êtres, embellit notre existence, la soutient et exerce son empire sur tout ce qui existe; sans ce rayon vivifiant tout seroit dans l'obscurité pénible et languissante.1

(One inscribes within a square, within an oval, within a circle the portrait of the woman one loves. One doesn't wander from the principle of adopting the forms that nature mandates. The first frame is without a doubt that which you see; it receives the divine influences that embrace our senses and reflects the world that surrounds us. It is this that composes all being, embellishes our existence, supports and exercises its empire over all that which exists; without this vivifying ray all would be in languid, painful obscurity.)

The present study is in many ways an effort to make sense of Ledoux’s words, his theatre designs, and his cryptic engraving, known as the “Coup d’œil du théâtre de Besançon,” which depicts a neo-classical theatre auditorium in perspective view surrounded by the iris, sclera and surrounding anatomy of an enormous eye (fig. 0.1). When I encountered

Ledoux’s image and its accompanying texts for the first time in the spring of 2003, I was already disposed to seeing theatre’s architectural frame as a model of consciousness, having studied with Spencer Golub, for whom the stage lends itself to the representation of the real, but also of a discrete, rapidly transforming frame of mind.2 I had also recently

1 Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des mœurs et de la législation (Paris: Hermann, 1997), 373. All translations are my own where not otherwise indicated.

2 Spencer Golub, Infinity (Stage) (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1999), 4, 43.

2 investigated citations of theatre architecture in phenomenological writing by Edmund

Husserl and Jacques Derrida, and remained convinced that theatrical staging played an unheralded role in modern European philosophy’s attempts to articulate the conditions and function of the conscious mind.3 It struck me that Ledoux’s superimposition of visual and theatrical frames amounted to an Enlightenment precursor to Derrida’s emphatic statement that “The phenomenological reduction is a stage” (La reduction phénoménologique est une scène).4 I resolved to ground an interpretation of Ledoux’s image—as yet not widely known to theatre and performance scholars—in the philosophical and theatrical history of eighteenth-century France.

The approximation of the contours of visual and theatrical frames in the decades before the Revolution will be examined throughout my study as a specific and contingent historical event, but as the phenomenological preoccupation with theatre makes clear, philosophical and theatrical representations of the world exhibit a pattern of mutual reference and imitation that precedes the advent of philosophical or theatrical modernity.

Put simply, theatre architecture of the Vitruvian model supported novel ways of thinking mankind in relation to the world. Guilio Camillo’s Memory Theatre and Andrea

Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza show that theatre architecture was appropriated to model the relationship of man to the catalog of human knowledge in the first case, and to articulate the problematic heterogeneity of visual perspective in the second. The fact that the same architectural template was taken up for the purpose of modeling both the ideal

3 Pannill Camp, “The Trouble with Phenomenology,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (Fall, 2004): 79-97.

4 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and other essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 86.

3 position of humanity with respect to knowledge and the contours of a generalized practice of vision forecasts the merging of these two projects in the form of Claude-

Nicolas Ledoux’s Theatre at Besançon two centuries later. The architectural theatre represents in each case a groping articulation of epistemological problems that prefigure notions of embodiment and consciousness that have informed much phenomenological writing in the twentieth century.

Guilio Camillo (1480-1544) attained remarkable fame in Europe for a creation he called his Memory Theatre. The infamous, unfinished wooden structure was seen by few and understood perhaps by none. According to accounts of those who saw versions of the structure in Venice and in Paris, it was large enough to fit two people within it, and the occupants of the theatre found themselves before a semi-circular array of images and boxes, across which were splayed symbols that represented all human knowledge.

Camillo conceived of this theatre as a type of memory aid or rhetorical apparatus that would empower the occupant “to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero.”5

While a comprehensive account of the theatre and its workings does not survive, the device was widely known, and Camillo spent decades traveling between Italy and France seeking financial support to bring the theatre, and a tome which would theorize it, to fruition. Tellingly, this means that Camillo’s theatre, or at least word of it, crisscrossed the geography that would situate most of the major innovations in theatre architecture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, fomenting intellectual curiosity about the workings of a theatre structure vis-à-vis human knowledge and elocution. What is more,

Frances Yates emphatically describes Camillo’s structure as an incarnation and “a

5 Erasmus, Epistolae, ed. P.S. Allen and others, IX, p. 479. Quoted in Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1966), 131.

4 distortion of the plan of the real Vitruvian theatre.”6 The circulation of this particular model theatre in Italy during the early sixteenth century may well have prompted architects to consider their own Vitruvian revivals.

According to an orthodox historiography, a properly phenomenological outlook— a philosophy explicitly concerned with consciousness as such—is not possible before

Descartes’ cogito. Yet there is reason to consider Camillo’s Memory Theatre to be an early, architectural model of the interdependent relationship between man and the world available as knowledge, and therefore evidence of an incipient spatial articulation of consciousness. While the structure was a tool for the enhancement of memory and elocution, it also attempted to aggregate all possible knowledge into a hierarchically layered grid, both positing an order to knowledge as such and groping at the limits of that knowledge. Camillo, it seems, considered the theatre to be not just a model of knowledge as ordered by the form of the world, but an architectonics of the human psyche.

According to Erasmus,

He calls this theatre of his by many names, saying now that it is a built or constructed mind and soul, and now that it is a windowed one. He pretends that all things that the human mind can conceive and which we cannot see with the corporeal eye, after being collected together by diligent meditation may be expressed by certain corporeal signs in such a way that the beholder may at once perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind. And it is because of this corporeal looking that he calls it a theatre.7

That the theatre models the mind and soul, that it enables the apprehension of hidden things which can be accessed through reflective contemplation, that it plumbs the depths of the human mind—all stamp Camillo as the architect of a philosophy of consciousness

6 Yates, Art of Memory, 136.

7 Ibid., 132.

5 prematurely born. For Camillo in 1540 the eye already looms as an organ whose function is the aspiration of the theatre. Yates points out that the middle of the seven rows which arrange the store of knowledge in Camillo’s theatre, the grade of the theatre dealing with the interior man, is marked with the image of the three Gorgon sisters who shared one eye among them.8 Not merely vision, but the eye itself comes to be identified with the apparatus of knowing. That which cannot be seen with the eye of the body demands a wooden structure to produce another manifest vision. That is to say that Camillo’s theatre is the embodiment of a seeing whose station and peculiar form is to produce a rarified knowing—in its materiality it is thought to manifest knowledge itself; the corporeal looking in the form of the theatre amounts to what Yates calls “a new Renaissance plan of the psyche,” and demonstrates the emergence of a novel regime of knowledge that depends, to some degree, on the deliverances of the senses.9

In accordance with this pattern—this practice of framing objects of knowledge— the long percolating preoccupation with vision and perspective would come to be incorporated into the architecture of the theatre and expressed through a continuous references to optics. The coincidence of a reinvigoration of theatre design, the sundry perspective techniques in visual arts, a proliferation of human anatomical knowledge and its reconciliation with a refined understanding of light and optics produced a series of buildings that manifest clear isomorphic resonances with the human eye. In particular the chiasmic confrontation of sightlines between stage and auditorium was articulated quite early by Camillo’s contemporary, Andrea Palladio.

8 Ibid., 149.

9 Ibid.

6 The decades during which Camillo shuttled between Italy and France promoting and raising funds for his speculative Memory Theatre were those during which Palladio was exposed to key influences. Yates speculates that Camillo’s enigmatic project was the subject of intense discussion in the academic halls of Italy and therefore might have been known to Palladio, who came to be the sole artist charter member of the Accademia

Olimpica in Vicenza, on whose premises the Teatro Olimpico was finally completed in

1580.10 This remarkable structure, still standing with its original scenic enhancements, demonstrates a concern with embodied practices of vision of a valence different from those manifested in Camillo’s Memory Theatre. While it imports a quasi-Vitruvian design for stage and auditorium (shortened into an ellipse due to exigencies of site),

Palladio’s theatre was fitted with a recessed scenic complex beyond the scenae frons that has marked the Teatro Olimpico as a unique venture in the genealogy of Western theatre design development.

Four years after Palladio’s death, Vincenzo Scamozzi and Palladio’s son Silla fitted the Olimpico’s scenae frons with seven perspective street scenes, five of which diverge from a nodal point on the threshold of the stage. These elaborate scenic constructions, backed by a dome painted as sky, were designed according to the perspective-foreshortening conventions described by Sebastiano Serlio in his 1545

Architettura. Rather than converging in Serlian fashion, however, to a vanishing point on the sagittal line of the theatre, they fanned out dramatically across a range of axes such that “at least one street [is] visible to each member of the audience.”11 The result, when

10 Ibid., 171.

11 Leacroft and Leacroft, Theatre and Playhouse: An Illustrated Survey of Theatre Building from Ancient Greece to the Present Day (London: Heinemann, 1988), 46-7.

7 seen in plan, reveals a crossing of sightlines from the outermost ranges of auditorium over each other down opposing street perspectives. Five of the seven streets converge at the intersection of the proscenium threshold with the sagittal plane of the theatre, creating a ‘nodal point’ suggestive of the reference point in ocular anatomy from which light rays seem to originate as they travel to the light receptors in the retina. Such a comparison evokes the emergence of an ocular theme in theatre architecture, conscious or otherwise, which would not be realized explicitly until two centuries later.

Andrea and Silla Palladio and Vincenzo Scamozzi were surely less concerned with biomorphism in the design of their multiple-vista scenic constructions than with the optical conventions of perspective. The Teatro Olimpico, accordingly, is an eccentric attempt to cross the imperatives of Vitruvius’ theatre model with the fashion of Serlian perspective scenery—to incorporate optics based on the conventions of perspective whose concern was the geometry of space as perceived, rather than the anatomical contours of the eye. Yet it would be hasty to assume that Palladio was not in mind of the anatomy of the body in relation to architecture. According to Ackerman, Palladio has been interpreted as an architect whose designs are guided by “human physical and psychological make-up in their appeal to permanently valid laws of harmony and in their reference to the structure of the human body.”12 Ackerman also points out the influence of the widely published anatomical drawings of Andreas Vesalius, who worked in Padua during Palladio’s youth. Whether or not Palladio thought of his Teatro Olimpico as recapitulating natural anatomical forms, his exemplary design nonetheless marks the instantiation of a chiasm that propagated through Western theatrical architecture.

12 James S. Ackerman, Palladio (New York and London: Penguin, 1966), 185.

8 Ledoux’s eighteenth-century engraving, as Anthony Vidler points out, signals the biomorphism of the theatre’s rounded proscenium arch. The arch gapes across the building interior, spanning the width of the second tier of boxes, and vaults up in roughly semi-circular fashion, mimicking the curvature of the iris partially covered by the upper eyelid. All of the theatre’s many functions as an institution, even those of arousing passions and demonstrating virtue, come to be governed by the eye. As a conduit for the senses, passions and sentiments, the Théâtre de Besançon might provoke “tender tears that bathe drop by drop without grimace;” it may also spur “heartrending sobs, oppressive visions.”13 The allegory of embodied vision so thoroughly pervades Ledoux that his emotional spasms must express themselves in lachrymal imagery. Ledoux’s theatre is the eye for the consideration of pure morals and virtues: it takes itself for anatomy, for a corporeal looking in its own right, a coup d’œil. While the eye is in part for Ledoux a figure for the knowledge to be imparted by instructive spectacles, it also lends its shape to a conscious effacement of the representational frame of the theatre. In “Théâtre de

Besançon: Idées Générales” the architect suggests that the congruence of the proscenium arch with the eye’s geometry causes the former to collapse into the latter, and disappear:

Qu'entendez-vous par une avant-scène? C'est l'embrâsure de la croisée, l'épaisseur intermédiaire habitée qui sépare l'action du dehors; c'est un corps lisse; c'est un repos que l'oeil se prepare pour augmenter le paisir de l'ame, en opposant la variété des situations de tous genres à la simplicité du cadre. Je ne vois en aucun lieu ce que vous énoncez; ce que l'on appelle avant-scene, accrédité par l'usage, n'est autre chose que la ligne continue de la salle jus-qu'au theatre.14

(What do we mean by a forestage? It is the window well, the intermediate thickness that separates the action from the outside; it is a smooth body; it is a rest which the eye prepares itself for augmenting the pleasure of the soul,

13 Ledoux, L’Architecture, 373.

14 Ibid., 380.

9 opposing the variety of situations of all types to the simplicity of the frame. I see nowhere that which is set forth; that which is called the forestage, legitimated by its usage, is nothing but the continuous line of the auditorium against the stage.)

The window frame, after all, is not intended to separate the outside, but open onto it. An arch of smooth masonry, deep enough to contain boxes for municipal potentates, and dizzyingly wide, thought Ledoux, would only enhance and amplify access to the performance, not enforce a separation. The theatre effectively imitates the eye, which

Ledoux identifies as the ‘first frame,’ and lines up behind it, hiding it from view. Vidler calls this biomorphic arch “the image of a view transparent to the scene itself,” calling to mind the suspensions and reductions of Husserl’s philosophy, which promised access to a mode of pure knowing capable of freeing the object from presuppositions, a mode within which vision remained the most privileged sense.15

Ledoux’s other choices forecast the instantiation of a heightened viewing, free from distractions. Ledoux sunk the orchestra into a pit both to prevent music from drowning out the voices of actors and to obscure them from view. Furthermore, Vidler points out that the various segregations of seating (sections included four boxes for the

King and Queen, Intendant and Governor of the Province, parquet, balcon, 1st and 2nd row of boxes, 1st and 2nd parterre), while enforcing a visibility that would deter “lubricity,” also prevented audience mixing which could encourage distracting chatter. Ledoux’s attempt to control the atmosphere of the theatre extended to control of odor. The outer row of the parterre was reserved for soldiers and the poorest members of the audience so that the center of the theatre wouldn’t smell like “people pressed into a carriage.”16 Every

15 Anthony Vidler, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Social Reform at the end of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1990), 177.

16 Ibid., 170.

10 aspect of the auditorium and forestage was meant to effect a calm and controlled environment where “one sees well everywhere,” and where “one is well seen.”17

By 1784, optical concerns in theatre architecture had condensed into a manifest ocular theme. The modeling of sightlines demanded that the theatre building display its optical genealogy. Anatomical and architectural renderings, similarly dependent on

Cartesian space, interpolated a grid, and founded their proportions according to the observable behavior of light. Sightlines, broadly defined, conferred morphology upon the theatre, but there was no uniform ideal of theatre construction. The Théâtre de

Besançon’s ocular isomorphism makes legible a confluence of philosophical inquiry, social transformation, and empiricist psychology prevalent in Enlightenment France. The conjugation of optics and theatre design at the end of the eighteenth century suggests a frame of mind, and a way of looking at nature as yet unsettled in the wake of

Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism. That the architect would propose to load spectators into a model of the human eye in order that passions, virtues, and morals might be made apparent implies the co-immanence of theatre and a practice of interrogating the appearance of the world which would itself crystallize under the banner of phenomenology a century later.

Ledoux’s Théatre de Besançon is usually overlooked in histories of Western theatre design but there is evidence to suggest a genealogical link between this theatre and another building of interest to students of theatre history. Leacroft and Leacroft posit that Ledoux’s theatre, in its united and open, if still segregated, auditorium and utopian aspirations, served as an influence for Wagner and Bruckwald’s Festspielhaus at

17 Ibid., 176.

11 Bayreuth. Ledoux’s “orchestra, set partly beneath the stage with a curved reflecting rear wall, was also taken up by Wagner.”18 The ‘mystic chasm’ effected by Wagner and

Bruckwald’s staggered proscenia may be presaged by Ledoux’s no less ideologically rendered avant-scène, for both articulations claim to reduce the factual world away so as to foster communal between audience and scene. Both Wagner’s discourse of purity, of an unimpeded encounter with the world within the frame, and his “preoccupation with the visual” serve to locate him in a line of descent from Ledoux’s architectural eye.19 Thus,

Ledoux, and the architectural, theatrical and philosophical histories in which he is embedded, promise to enhance the way theatrical representation and Enlightenment overlapped in eighteenth-century France.

In order to account for a phenomenon manifested in the architectural, theatrical and philosophical histories of eighteenth-century France, I present four chronologically overlapping chapters that address different aspects of my historical object. My first chapter tracks the gradual elision of the academic theoretical distinction between the factual world known to spectators and the discrete, illusory worlds depicted on stage between the 1650s and the 1770s in France. After the permeation of French aesthetics by

Lockean sensationism in the first decades of the century, theatrical innovators including

Diderot began to propose a dramaturgy that self-consciously replicated the world known to bourgeois spectators. Diderot’s 1757 Entretiens sur le fils naturel in particular reveals the immanence perceived to be called for between real and staged states of affairs in enlightened dramaturgy. Meanwhile, as I explain in my second chapter, the accretion of

18 R. Leacroft and H. Leacroft, Theatre and Playhouse, 92, 113.

19 Izenour, 282.

12 rehearsal protocols and spectatorial practices to experimental physics in the middle of the century helped narrow the gap between philosophy’s encounter with the natural world and the theatre spectator’s encounter with the stage. With particular attention to the Abbé

Nollet’s experimental physics course at the Collège de Navarre as an example, I argue that lecture demonstrations of natural phenomena amounted to a paratheatrical performance form that peaked in popularity during the most active years of the theatre architecture reform movement.

My third chapter narrates the theatre architecture reform movement in France between 1748 and 1784, with special attention to the gradual refinement of spectatorial function within the theoretical texts. I argue that the spectator, as deployed by theatre architects, became the subject of a momentary act of aural and visual apprehension, and that the increasingly central referent of the “object” of theatrical representation shows that theatre architecture reform conformed with the shift in dramatic theory described in my first chapter. The fourth and final chapter of my dissertation analyzes and theorizes the appearance of spatial relations and geometric assemblies native to optics in theatre designs by architects including C.N. Cochin, Charles de Wailly and Ledoux. Here I argue that an optical—and by extension, philosophical—representation of space appropriated by theatre architects demonstrates a conflation of theatrical and philosophical representations of space in the late eighteenth century.

I conclude by arguing that the convergence of the philosophical encounter with the world and the spectatorial encounter with the stage suggests that techniques of thought associated with theatrical representation—especially the separation of discrete objective domains and the induced dispositionality of factual states of affairs—were

13 consequently made available for use in mediatizing the spectator’s understanding of the world.

14 CHAPTER 1

THE REFORMULATION OF THE THEATRICAL FRAME IN FRENCH

DRAMATIC THEORY, 1657-1773

Imagine someone at a theatre performance where a multitude of objects seem to fight for his attention.

-Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, 1746

The geometer who after the reading of a tragedy asked, ‘what does that prove?’ overstated the matter, but there is a profound meaning hidden below the utterance: he sensed with confusion that there had not been a well determined goal in this huge expenditure of mind and of talent; he expressed himself ridiculously, but he discerned like a philosopher.

-Louis-Sébastien Mercier, 1773

For several Months past I have enjoy’d such Liberty and Leisure in this distant Retreat, far beyond the Verge of that great Whirlpool of Business, Faction, and Pleasure, which is called the World.

-George Berkeley, 1732

The fealty of eighteenth-century French playwrights to the classical rules of theatrical representation belies a fundamental transformation in dramatic theory that unfolds between D’Aubignac and Diderot. As Pierre Frantz has observed, the notion of theatrical framing itself – as manifested in dramatic theory, acting, and plastic elements of staging – underwent a renovation, turning away from rhetorical and poetic notions of theatrical representation and towards a painterly tableau aesthetic. Frantz writes that

...la théorie du théâtre, soumise à l’influence de l’Abbé Dubos et du sensualisme, s’éloigne des “poétiques” qui l’ont marquée depuis la Renaissance, devient une

15 “esthétique” au sens pris par ce mot au XVIIIe siècle, renouvelle la rencontre du théâtre et de la peinture, active leur “échange” […].20

(…dramatic theory, under the influence of the Abbé Dubos and of sensationism, distanced itself from the “poetics” that had marked it since the Renaissance, and became an “aesthetic” as the word was understood in the eighteenth century, renewing the encounter between theatre and painting and invigorating their “exchange” […].)

This transaction has been described from the vantage of art history in Michael Fried’s study of the ‘anti-theatrical’ disregard of the spectator in the absorption in various tasks of eighteenth-century painted subjects.21 For theatre practice, tableau both came to prominence in the theoretical vocabulary of drama and became increasingly denotative of visual composition. Tableau, in the parlance of mid-century dramatists, took on a meaning distinct from the rhetorical notion of hypotypose – or mental picture evoked by poetic description – which had been its settled definition. For Frantz, a concentration on the visual frame, underwritten by Enlightenment sensationist philosophy, crystallized into a “tableau aesthetic,” and the shifting definition of tableau marks “from the point of view of theatrical writing and of dramatic representation […] a profound transformation of protocol, of modalities and functions of representation.”22

Visual sense and the aesthetics of tableau received strong emphasis in Diderot’s dramatic writings in the 1750s and remained prevalent through the last decades of the

Ancien Régime. This semi-philosophical, semi-aesthetic trend also provides crucial context for the most active period of theatre architecture reform in France’s history.

20 Pierre Frantz, L’esthétique du tableau dans le théâtre du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 4-5. All translations are mine where not otherwise indicated. In some cases where suitable English translations were available, I have quoted only the translation and not the original.

21 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

22 Frantz, L’esthétique du tableau, 12.

16 Diderot wrote his influential tragédies bourgeoises and theoretical documents in the years after the opening of the first freestanding special use theatre in France, Soufflot’s theatre in Lyon. This building, which Diderot mentions in his Entretiens sur le fils naturel, was the first in a wave of monumental theatre building projects propelled by a pervasive French théâtromanie, and nourished by Enlightenment ideas. More than 100 new theatres were built France over the second half of the century23 – to say nothing of the unrealized plans – and these were accompanied by a flurry of treatises, books of engravings and public letters in which a wide-ranging debate on the issue was sustained into the years of the Revolution. The theatre designs of the time could not but reckon with the mutation in dramatic theory manifested in the writings of Diderot and Louis-

Sébastien Mercier (1740-1814), yet studies of French Enlightenment-era theatre architecture have tended to focus instead on the practical demands of theatre-making, the impact on urban development of monumental theatres, and shifts in architectural style.

In this chapter I will describe a paradigm shift in eighteenth-century dramatic theory in France that informed theatre architecture reform in the second half of the century.24 Theoretical and architectural attempts to articulate the theatrical frame were subject to a complex mixture of ideological, political, and material influences. The wave of theatre architecture reform that began in the 1750s, notable both for the variety and the

23 Pierre Frantz and Michèle Sajous d’Oria, Le Siècle des Théâtres: Salles et Scènes en France 1748-1807 (Paris : Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, 1999), 5.

24 I term this development a “paradigm shift” in cognizance of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, though my usage is not meant to imply that this shift in dramatic theory entails precisely the same social dynamic that Kuhn attributes to revolutions in scientific theories. I do, however, observe in the French Enlightenment a profound transition from a largely stable understanding of the procedures of theatrical representation supported by an albeit institutionally-enforced consensus to an alternate view held by an increasingly influential group of figures. The advent of drame, of course, did not displace tragedy in French eighteenth-century theatrics, but it did emerge as a viable alternative mode of framing theatrical performance. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

17 sheer volume of architectural plans it produced, cannot be explained solely by examining dramatic theory. Yet it can be hypothesized that the prevailing understanding of theatrical representation informed the work of theatre architecture reformers. Moreover, scholars have suggested that the sensationist current in eighteenth-century epistemology fed both dramatic theory and architectural theory in France,25 a fact that motivates a concentrated look at the intellectual dynamics that linked epistemological trends with the theoretical understanding of performance. I maintain that a shift in dramatic theory towards treating the stage image as though it were a segment of the factual world known to spectators drew support from a gradual, concurrent movement in French philosophy that emphasized the primacy of sense experience to knowledge.

This chapter traces a subtle but profound reformulation of dramatic theory in the early eighteenth-century. In the seventeenth-century, rationalist Cartesian philosophy drew its technique of conjuring imaginary worlds from literary and theatrical modes of representation. The resulting sympathy between theatrical and philosophical worlds contributed to a rationally grounded academic dramaturgy that was refined and diffused in the middle of the century. However, the gradual attenuation of Cartesian philosophy, due in part to the growing influence of Newton and Lockean empiricism in France, destabilized the meaning of vraisemblance and liberalized the unities of time, place and action, which had been the mainstays of classical dramaturgy since the early seventeenth century. Theorists beginning with Abbé Dubos in 1719 manifested an escalating concern with the sensory in theatre, and came to model the spectator’s encounter with the stage on

25 Daniel Rabreau, Le Théâtre et l’embellissement des villes de France au XVIIIe siècle (PhD dissertation: Paris IV, 1978), xxxvii. See also Downing A. Thomas, “Architectural Visions of Lyric Theatre and Spectatorship in Late-Eighteenth-Century France,” Representations, No. 52 (Autumn, 1995), 52-75.

18 a sensationist formulation of the mind’s encounter with the world. Whereas for

D’Aubignac the stage is an illusory world, distant to but parallel with the real by virtue of the metaphysical legalities that inhere to it, mid-eighteenth-century dramatic theorists imagined theatrical representations that were virtual segments of the world known to the theatre-going public. These trends undermined the distinctions that cleaved the world of the stage from reality in the Enlightenment mind; the stage increasingly came to be aligned with objects of empirical knowledge in general.

My overarching intent is to describe this broad modification in the relationship between the world that was the domain of natural philosophy and the minor worlds that populated the theatrical frames of Enlightenment France. To this end, I will endeavor to show that both the philosophical and aesthetic history of the eighteenth century—as manifest in the development of interlocking problems in epistemology and natural philosophy on the one hand and mutations in the theory and practice of theatre on the other—exhibit a shift in emphasis from a classical paradigm of reflection in the seventeenth century to one of transparency in the mid-eighteenth century. Reflection and transparency stand as gathering concepts that permeate the intellectual and artistic production of the Enlightenment, ordering the ways that representation produced meaning for the siècle des lumières.

Reflection and transparency, in my use of the terms, are not just denotative of catoptrics and dioptrics, which trace the pathways of light rays as they interact with reflective and transparent media respectively, nor are they simply types of visual experience of the material world. The terms also describe pervasive modes of thought habitual to the early (seventeenth century) and late (eighteenth century) phases of French

19 Enlightenment. Reflection (réflexion) also stood for a sustained mental action, a

“meditation serieuse, consideration attentive sur quelque chose”26 (serious meditation about or attentive consideration of something). Thus it was the central mental activity of rationalist philosophy, which puzzled out the mysteries of nature into systems founded on the innate powers of reason. Descartes in fact believed that the laws of nature had been divinely written in the human mind such that inward contemplation offered the best means of knowing the world.27

Reflection has also been cited as an emblem of the cultural function of seventeenth-century theatre. Larry F. Norman, in his study of Molière’s theatre, notes that the theatrical frame was seen to operate as a collective social mirror:

The mirror has two senses here, equally powerful for the seventeenth-century mind. It is first a reproduction of reality, a copy of nature for contemplation and instruction. […] But the mirror does not only reflect nature, it also reflects other mirrors. This is the second sense of the mirror: a double to artifice. French classicism, despite its emphasis on clarity, reveals here a continuing baroque taste for multiple narrative and pictorial levels, for the mise-en-abyme, for the play within the play.28

The classical “age of representation,” according to Norman’s analysis, embodied a baroque proliferation of meaning through the combinatory power of mirror images.

Seventeenth-century theatre, like the rationalist systems of nature devised by Descartes,

Leibniz and Malebranche, displayed an unrestrained capacity for representation founded

26 Dictionnare de l’Académie française, First ed. (Paris, 1694), 463.

27 Descartes in 1637 considered nature to be the result of God’s established laws, “dont il a imprimé de telles notions en nos âmes, qu’après y avoir fait assez de réflexion nous ne saurions douter qu’elles ne soient exactement observées en tout ce qui est ou qui se fait dans le monde” (of which he has imprinted such notions in our souls that after having done enough reflecting on them, we will not doubt that they are observed exactly in all that there is or that occurs in the world). Discours de la méthode in Descartes, Œuvres philosophiques, t. 1 (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1963), 614.

28 Larry F. Norman, The Public Mirror: Molière and the Social Commerce of Depiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 2.

20 on mental reflection. But these tendencies were eventually to be combatted by a countercurrent in the French Enlightenment introduced from English experimental science and psychology. The empiricist focus on an unmediated sensory apprehension of the world’s objects, as I will show in the several chapters of this study, came to displace reflection not only in dramatic theory, but in natural philosophy and eventually in the architectural construction of theatre spectatorship.

If French theatre of the seventeenth century reflected social and political truths to their audiences as though in a mirror image, the drama of Diderot and Mercier rather took the window in its transparency and unifying function as its emblematic architectural frame. Before beginning to unravel the components of the shift that occurred between seventeenth and eighteenth-century dramaturgy, however, it is necessary to show that, for

Descartes, the theatre provided a set of representational techniques that aided in creating his highly subjectivist, epoch-forming philosophy.

I. Descartes’ Worlds

The burdening of the medieval Scholastic tradition over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries coincided with both a revival of Platonic thought in the person of René Descartes and a golden age of secular drama in France.29 Descartes’

Discours de la Méthode, which attacked the sufficiency of scholastic learning, was published in 1637, the same year that saw the controversy over Le Cid, which resulted in

29 For a survey of Neoplatonist thought in the 15th and 16th centuries see Jill Kraye, “The Philosophy of the Italian Renaissance,” The Renaissance and 17th Century Rationalism, ed. G.H.R. Parkinson (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 26-37. For a discussion of Descartes’ debt to Plato on such standard rationalist concepts as the interconnection of all knowledge and innate ideas see John Cottingham, The Rationalists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 6, 70.

21 the reaffirmation of Aristotle’s unities as the metaphysical basis for dramaturgy. This coincidence of signal events in the emergence of both philosophical and theatrical modernity suggests that a theatrical mode of representing the world infiltrated rationalist philosophy. It is well known that Descartes was an admirer of the theatre, and that theatrical performance influenced his thought. Theatre was a part of his Jesuit education according to Richard Watson, and a handful of references to the theatre in his writing indicate a familiarity and even an enthusiasm for drama.30 Neither was the appeal of secular theatre lost on Descartes' contemporary Leibniz, who, despite his theological convictions, evidently traveled in the same circles as dramatic poets. Leibniz was familiar with the work of Jean Racine and may have known him personally, according to a letter to the philosopher from Frédéric Adolphe Hansen which makes mention of

“Racine, qui vous est bien connu” 31 (who is well known to you).

The thought of rationalist philosophers such as Descartes and Leibniz may have in fact been influenced by the conventions of stagecraft to which they were witness.

Seventeenth-century rationalism and French theatre were mutually concerned with the apprehension and instantiation of the world both in its singularity and unity and as the object of a unified cognition. Since these cognitions could be made at will and put to use in rationalist thought experiments, multiple dispositional worlds proliferated in the

30 In an early fragment, Descartes casts himself, the philosopher, as a masked player performing for the world, showing his familiarity with the ubiquitous figure of the theatrum mundi: “Actors, taught not to let any embarrassment show on their faces, put on a mask. I will do the same. So far, I have been a spectator in this theatre which is the world, but I am now about to mount the stage, and I come forward masked.” René Descartes. “Preliminaries,” The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. I, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2. See also Richard Watson, Cogito Ergo Sum: The Life of René Descartes, (Boston: Godine, 2002), 72.

31 Fernand Baldensperger. “Encore la ‘cabale de Phedre”: Leibniz du mauvais cote?” Modern Language Notes Vol. 58, No. 7 (Nov., 1943), 523-6.

22 seventeenth-century learned mind.32 Both the philosophy and the theatre of the period overtly aspired to an adequate and complete apprehension of the world, as exemplified by

Descartes’ natural philosophy and the ruminations of the French Academy following the

Cid controversy. As philosophers grappled with a number of possible or conceptual worlds, playwrights came to recognize the representational structure of theatre as an instrument for combinatory experiments. This most evident in meta-theatrical plays like

Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique (1636) and Molière’s Critique de l’École des Femmes

(1663). Like mirror images, baroque theatrical worlds could be combined and nested within each other ad infinitum. World apprehending and instantiating was a cognitive technique proper to both theatre and philosophy. Theatre provided sensate models for a philosophical style of thought, and both theatre and rationalist philosophy found solutions for the problems of encompassing the world in its infinitude, its scope, and its outside, by means of thought and representation.

At first gloss, philosophical rationalism seems to be at odds with theatricality. In seeking to “reduce the number of occult qualities as much as possible,” to make mathematics the model for a unified system of knowledge of the world, and to devise versatile methods for building an all-encompassing edifice of knowledge, rationalism seems to banish the duplicitous, the showy, and the self-consciously performed.33 But this characterization rests ultimately on an anachronistic account of scholasticism and a reductive understanding of theatricality. In fact, rationalism depends on doubt, an

32 This term will be used in this chapter both in the sense of a tendency or inclination towards some activity or state of affairs and in the sense of disposal. A dispositional world is in a sense artificial: it may be opened up by an act of cognition but includes as its predicate that it may be closed as well. Dispositionality stands for the fact that philosophically and theatrically rendered worlds could be opened and closed at will.

33 Paul Janet, Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics, Correspondence with Arnauld, Monadology, (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1980), vii.

23 assumption that the world might not be as it appears, and a tendency toward elaborate, spectacular contortions of thought. John Cottingham sums up rationalist philosophy as a set of ideas that cohere to five central tendencies:

To recapitulate, one element in rationalist thought is a certain caution about the deliverances of the senses, and a belief that the correct use of reason will enable us to progress beyond the naïve, common-sense view of the world. Another is the vision of the universe as an ordered system, every aspect of which is in principle accessible to the human intellect. A further strand is a tendency to be impressed by mathematics both in virtue of its intrinsic clarity and certainty, and also because it is seen as a model for a well-founded and unified system of knowledge. And a final element (from which many more could no doubt be discerned) is the belief that in necessary connections in nature, and, more generally, the view that scientific and philosophical truth must involve reference to that which, in some sense, cannot be otherwise.34

Manifest in this summation is a dual tendency. On the one hand, the rationalist thinker encounters the world as a unity, waiting to be mapped by a transparent system of knowledge. Every phenomenon comes with the potential to be understood according to the same precepts that explain every other phenomenon. Mathematics and geometry, which demonstrate a thorough interdependency and coherence, as well as a reducibility to elemental and intuitive truths, are held up as models. On the other hand, the rationalist is beset by distortions and obstacles that are generated not only by naïve thinking and poor scholarship, but by the mode of presentation of the senses themselves. The senses being part of the given world, part of the body as God allowed it to exist, illusion and mystification are not merely the products of the inadequate explanations of others, but are also built into the world itself.

Descartes’ strategy for composing a body of adequate knowledge in spite of the error that lurks in wait for the philosopher is radical. Rather than approaching several

34 John Cottingham, The Rationalists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 10-1.

24 areas of knowledge and trying to comb sources of error out of them, he resolves to wipe away what he presumes to know and start over. In the Discours de la Méthode he explains:

Thus, because our senses sometimes deceive us, I decided to suppose that nothing was such as they led us to imagine. And since there are men who make mistakes in reasoning committing logical fallacies concerning the simplest questions in geometry, and because I judged that I was as prone to error as anyone else I rejected as unsound all the arguments I had previously taken as demonstrative proofs.35

From this the philosopher devises a system of knowledge that is unified and singular in its validity. Descartes finds that there is a single world. The second part of his Principles of Philosophy (1644) includes a statement that identifies the world as an object of knowledge that is single and unified.36 This assessment reduces the single world to a property of its substance, namely its extension in space, and, critically, draws an indefinite epistemological boundary around it on the basis of its ability to be imagined.

That is to say that Descartes makes the scope of the natural world co-extensive with his imagination of it. The world may in fact extend beyond what we can imagine of it, but nothing within the scope of imaginable space may be anything but a part of the one corporeal world. This passage is of note not only because of its ultimate reliance on conceptual evidence to reinforce the limit between the world and its outside, but because it signals also that Descartes was aware of a shadowy region outside of imaginable space, yet at least nominally available to the mind. It is possible that Descartes meant this

35 Descartes, Vol. 1, 127.

36 “22. Similarly, the earth and the heavens are composed of one and the same matter; and there cannot be a plurality of worlds. It can also easily be gathered from this that celestial matter is no different from terrestrial matter. And even if there were an infinite number of worlds, the matter of which they were composed would have to be identical; hence, there cannot in fact be a plurality of worlds, but only one. For we very clearly understand that the matter whose nature consists simply in its being an extended substance already occupies absolutely all the imaginable space in which the alleged additional worlds would have to be located; and we cannot find within us an idea of any other sort of matter.” Descartes, Vol. 1, 232.

25 elaboration to refute the musings of contemporaries who maintained that a plurality of worlds ringing other stars was possible.37

The instantiation of limits around an object of knowledge is an indispensable part of the Cartesian method. In order to be certain of our knowledge of the world, the objects in it, and the individual components of complicated systems like geometry must be broken down into their simplest constituent parts. The second of the four simple rules that found the Discourse on the Method is “to divide each of the difficulties I examined into as many parts as possible and as may be required in order to solve them better.”38

Thus working from simplest apprehension to the most complex, these latter being nothing but amalgamations of simpler objects, an architecturally39 integral body of knowledge was to be built up. Beneath this need to subdivide and reduce is a dependence on the unity of an object to ensure a complete understanding of it. Just as it is necessary to have one absolute corporeal world, it is vital that individual propositions of a system of knowledge have a unity defined by a closure against “superfluous conceptions” and guaranteeing that they can be completely understood by intuition. Presumably any problem “may be more easily solved” if one “abstracts it from everything else.”40 By reducing the world into discrete, knowable segments, and then combining these segments in a concatenation of knowing glances, Descartes posits the world as perfectly knowable.

37 Pierre Borel, Descartes’ contemporary and biographer wrote a famous treatise justifying the existence of a “plurality of worlds.” Several seventeenth-century texts addressed the plurality of worlds, including John Wilkins The Discovery of a World in the Moone, (London, 1638). See Pierre Borel, A new treatise proving a multiplicity of worlds (London: John Streater, 1658).

38 Descartes, Vol. 1, 120.

39 Descartes’ work, especially his early work, is permeated with architectural figures. It is of particular note that these passages tend to aid the philosopher in speaking of the totality of his system and of the knowledge procured through it. The Discourse on the Method includes several such passages.

40 Descartes, Vol. 1, 56.

26 Descartes mandates rigorous attention to the matters that are clearly and distinctly knowable, yet things that fall necessarily outside of knowledge threaten to encroach.

While the philosopher tends to exclude these things from inquiry, sources of error and their confrontation in fact motivate the first steps of the method. Descartes famously sought to confront his doubt by relentlessly magnifying it. He claims, in the First

Meditation to

…suppose therefore that not God, who is supremely good and the source of truth, but rather some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colors shapes, sounds and all the external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment.41

In this exercise, God is figured as a benevolent metteur en scène of the world of appearance, who in a paranoid magnification of doubt turns out to be a malignant deceiver. Of course, these possible deceptions extend through only the “external” things, leaving Descartes free to utter his famous dictum, je pense donc je suis, out of an indubitable intuition and to make it his foundation, but the method of reaching this foundation, ironically, depends on a restrained radicalization of doubt.42

At this point one can begin to describe Descartes’ theatrical ontology. First of all, it should be observed that, in Cartesian thought, variously construed limitations on the known and knowable are, in effect, the masking of an identifiable but obscure region of inquiry. God, the creator and preserver of all things material, has included in the results of his conception a formidable hidden region to which we have no access. This region is

41 Descartes, Vol. 2, 15.

42 Of course, Descartes’ doubt is not fully radicalized. An all-powerful malignant deceiver could certainly provide the delusion of existence or of the false validity of any proceeding inference along the way. See John Cottingham, “Descartes: metaphysics and the philosophy of mind” in Routledge History of Philosophy Volume 4: The Renaissance and 17th Century Rationalism, ed. G.H.R. Parkinson (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 209.

27 a source of trepidation for Descartes, who recommends leaving these regions alone in favor of those objects of which we can hope to gain a clear and direct apprehension, which takes the form of a glance, or coup d’œil.43 The infinite is transmuted into the indefinite.44 Descartes’ awareness of this boundary suggests that the use of theatrical metaphor—as in the Discours, when he depicts himself as a “spectator rather than an actor in all the comedies played out”45 in the world—may amount to more than a simple figure. The spectatorial role of the philosopher, who passively receives boundaries to knowledge rendered like those concealed in a theatre, in fact identifies one aspect of

Cartesian theatricality: the philosopher’s freedom to gaze upon the world. The range of what is visible is limited by an intelligent force.

A second theatrical theme in Descartes’ work is tied to the way his method responds to the indefinite extension and complexity of the world by finding the possibility of adequate knowledge in reduction and exclusion of alterity (objects, others, things in view). The reduction called for in the Discourse and in Rule 13 is made possible by a conceptual closure against the rest of the objective world that mirrors the technique of observation effected by theatre architecture of the era. Witness Descartes’ description of a clear and distinct perception in the 45th statement of part one of the

Principles: “I call a perception ‘clear’ when it is present and accessible to the attentive

43 The “glance,” or coup d’œil, is a crucial term in the wider scope of the issues that are part of my study. The coup d’œil is the title of the etching of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux that superimposes the eye on the theatre auditorium.

44 In part one of Principles, statement 26, Descartes proscribes this reduction: “We should never enter into arguments about the infinite. Things in which we observe no limits – such as the extension of the world, the division of the parts of matter the number of stars, and so on – should instead be regarded as indefinite.” Descartes, Vol. 1, 201.

45 “Et en toutes les neuf années suivantes je ne fis autre chose que rouler ça et là dans le monde, taschant d’y estre spectateur plustost qu’acteur en toutes les Comedies qui s’y jouent.” Discours de la Methode (Paris: Fayard, 1986), 29.

28 mind – just as we say we see something clearly when it is presented to the eye’s gaze and stimulates it with a sufficient degree of strength and accessibility. I call a perception

‘distinct’ if, as well as being clear, it is so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains within itself only what is clear.”46 Just as a theatre building aims to grant direct access to an object free from the distractions of the outside world—an access all- to-readily reduced to a direct gaze—so the Cartesian technique of inquiry demands an encounter of sufficient clarity, access and separation.

The final theatrical theme manifested in Cartesian thought is a pattern of thought that imagines discrete, dispositional worlds in composing an explanation of his natural philosophy. In other words, Descartes proposes thought experiments in order to conceive of the world of natural philosophy as a discrete entity. In an early treatise entitled The

World or Treatise on Light, which he began in 1629 as part of a two-part work (with the

Treatise on Man)—but withheld from publication until 1664 after the condemnation of

Galileo in 1633—the philosopher attempts his first significant foray into natural science.

The World is a complex text that aims to show in the first section, “[t]he difference between our sensations and the things that produce them.”47 Descartes proceeds to expound on a variety of topics relating sensory perceptions and mental images to their material causes, before turning suddenly to a holistic depiction of what he sees as the structure of the natural world:

For a while, then, allow your thought to wander beyond this world to view another world - a wholly new one which I shall bring into being before your mind in imaginary spaces. The philosophers tell us that such spaces are infinite, and they should certainly be believed, since it is they who invented them. But in order to keep this infinity from hampering and confusing us let us not try to go

46 Descartes, Vol. 1, 207-8.

47 Descartes, Vol. 1, 81.

29 right to the end: let us enter it only far enough to lose sight of all the creatures that God made five or six thousand years ago; and after stopping in some definite place, let us suppose that God creates anew so much matter all around us that in whatever direction our imagination may extend, it no longer perceives any place which is empty.48

Here Cartesian thought reveals its debt to the rhetorical instruction Descartes encountered as part of his Jesuit course of study. In order to bring certain facts to light, the philosopher initiates, by imaginative fiat, a discrete world that is 1) explicitly separate and “beyond” the singular world of natural philosophy, 2) instantly available and closeable against the world of facts (illusory), 3) subject to manipulation according to the will of its author/artificer, 4) spatially organized and theorized and, 5) granted a horizon in relation to the willfully directed gaze of the author/observer. In other words, it is conceptually identical to a world represented in a theatre. Descartes is clear about the distinction between the cognitive space he’s set out in his treatise, and suggests that his maneuver is derived from a device of fiction, “as if my intention was simply to tell you a fable.”49

Yet, there are reasons not to dismiss the instantiation of a provisional world as an epiphenomenon divorced from his method. Descartes utilizes the same ratio of indefiniteness to circumscribe both his imaginary world and the world of nature, implying that each is a scope or limit upon which further analysis of that world depends.

What is more, Descartes later in the same work uses the possibility of conceiving of another world as the ground from which to back up an assertion on the evident truth of mathematically proved laws. “The knowledge of these truths is so natural to our souls that we cannot but judge them infallible when we conceive them distinctly, nor doubt that

48 Descartes, Vol. 1, 90.

49 Descartes, Vol. 1, 98.

30 if God had created many worlds they would be as true in each of them as in this one.”50

The existence of truths that transcend the world itself is figured by Descartes as the operability of the propositions in a provisionally conceived world, which begs the question whether Descartes uses the same provisional world in the second example as in the first.

In this section, I have attempted to show that the appearance of theatrical metaphor and figure in Descartes’ writing reveals a reliance upon theatrical representation in his philosophical method. This theatricality of Descartes’ philosophy demonstrates that rationalist philosophy abstracted certain techniques of theatrical representation: the manipulation of a boundary between what is hidden and shown, and the instantiation of discrete domains of thought whose scope extended to that of the world itself. In my second chapter, I will show how such techniques were modified to suit the paratheatrical performance tradition of experimental physics demonstrations, but first it remains to be shown how the latter technique was appropriated by the academic dramaturgy of the late seventeenth century and later reformulated by eighteenth-century

French drama.

II. The Paradigm Shift in Theories of Theatrical Representation 1657-1773

At first gloss, one might dispute the claim that dramatic theory in France underwent a significant reformulation between the end of the grand siècle and the advent of bourgeois drama. The Aristotelian unities (time, place and action), endorsed by

Georges de Scudéry in his criticism of Corneille’s 1636 Le Cid, ratified thereafter by

50 Descartes, Vol. 1, 97.

31 Richelieu, and reinforced by the Abbé D’Aubignac in his La practique du théâtre of

1657, remained valid in the eighteenth century. Diderot, in the 1757 Entretiens sur le fils naturel, declares “the laws of the three unities are hard to observe, but they are reasonable.”51 Verité (truth) and vraisemblance (verisimilitude or probability) remained key concepts for depicting the fictive worlds of bourgeois drama, just as they had done for the historical subjects of classical French tragedy. The ideal of audience absorption in the world of the play, for D’Aubignac as well as for Diderot, was described as illusion, and for both theoreticians illusion was best achieved by presenting an image of the real world52 on stage.

But this retention of vraisemblance and illusion as criteria masks a renovation of the understanding of theatrical representation itself—that is to say, in the relationship of staged states of affairs to the real world—evident between D’Aubignac and advocates of bourgeois drama such as Diderot and Mercier. Frantz, in an attempt to explain this trend, claims the intellectual conditions of the Enlightenment, including “historical relativism, reference to experience, and sensationist ideology gave another meaning to ‘reason,’

‘truth,’ and ‘verisimilitude.’”53 Though one must not presume that dramatic theory necessarily moved in lock step with epistemological trends, there is reason to believe that

51 Diderot, Entretiens sur les fils naturel in Œuvres Complètes de Diderot, v. X (Paris: Herrman, 1980), 85.

52 The term “real world” requires clarification in a historical study of philosophical and theatrical representation. In an ahistorical sense, this term may be construed, after Wittgenstein, to designate that which is comprised of facts (see Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1 – 1.21). This definition opposes the real world to the illusory states of affairs represented in works of art, including theatre. Though both Diderot and Mercier use the term “real” (réel) in contrast to illusion, it is not used as such by D’Aubignac. D’Aubignac, rather, opposes “a specific World” (un Monde particulier) of the stage to “the big World” (le grand Monde), in a very similar opposition. In this chapter the term “real world” will refer to the world of facts in an ahistorical sense, and uses of “réel” or the “grand Monde,” etc. will be used in their historical sense.

53 “…le relativisme historique, la référence à l’expérience, l’idéologie sensualiste ont donné un autre sens aux mots de “raison,” de ‘vérité’ et de ‘vraisemblance.’” Frantz, L’esthétique du tableau, 4.

32 the waning philosophical currency of rationalism in favor of Lockean and Newtonian worldviews and the subsequent popularization of sensationism affected the development of dramatic theory in France in the eighteenth century.54

A paradigm shift is observable between the conceptual frameworks that support the dramatic theory of D’Aubignac and that of Diderot and Mercier. D’Aubignac, in La practique du théâtre, both insists on a distinction between the “grand Monde” to which actors and spectators belong as such and the “Mondes particuliers” represented on stage, and theorizes the relationship between those worlds through vraisemblance, a term he never directly defines. The integrity of stage representations comes to rest both upon internal qualities of causality and spatiotemporal uniformity and on an imitation of an external historical truth. Discrete, illusory stage worlds in seventeenth-century dramaturgy are instantiated by absolute distinctions with the real and subject to principles of uniformity and continuity. They depend, in other words, on the same formal attributes that undergird a rationalist understanding of the world at large, but the relationship between this “grand Monde” and “Mondes particuliers” subsists in pure abstraction.

Plays, for D’Aubignac, are like mirror images, displaying an absolute parallelism with the real world by virtue of their dependence on rational principles, but illusory and absolutely closed off against the world of lived experience. Accordingly, the subjects of theatrical representation are conceived at a spatiotemporal distance from the factual world in order to avoid confusion. This formulation contrasts starkly with that advanced

54 An anonymous commentator on the Parisian Salons claimed that “works in prose and verse have had to receive the law of dominant fashion and of current opinions, which form, so to say, the philosophy of the century” while maintaining that such trends left painting untouched due to its reliance on the senses. Quoted in Rémy G. Saisselin, “Ut Pictura Poesis: DuBos to Diderot” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Winter, 1961), 150.

33 by Diderot and Mercier, who insisted that the stage display an image of life as it is known directly by the spectator, and for whom the ideal theatrical presentation ought to seem to be, in all respects, like a segment of reality. Diderot’s Entretiens sur le fils naturel and

Mercier’s Du théâtre indicate that the new paradigm for the frame of bourgeois drama is rather that of a window through which the audience spies real events. Images on stage, though not themselves part of reality, are by the last decades of the Ancien Régime thought to incorporate and directly imitate the social world known to the spectator.

As I will show, this theoretical overhaul did not repudiate the conceptual distinction between stage and real worlds that D’Aubignac propounds. It is not the case that Diderot and Mercier wanted the events of their plays to be taken for actual constituents of reality. Rather, the overhaul in dramatic theory consists of three historical developments: 1) empiricist challenges to Cartesian rationalism undermined the absolute distinctions and rational principles that provided the scaffolding for D’Aubignac’s dramatic theory, 2) the advent of sensationist theories of knowledge provided an alternative framework that posited sense as a mediating term between the mind and discrete external objects, and 3) the distinction between the grand Monde and the Mondes particuliers of the stage became formalized, that is, stabilized to the point that it was widely accepted in practice and its maintenance ceased to require that theatrical subjects be separated from the reality known to spectators. The cumulative result of these developments was a dramatic theory with recourse to a materialist theory of sense perception, and for which the spectatorial encounter with the stage approximated the empiricist natural philosopher’s sensory encounter with discrete objects of knowledge.

34 a. D’Aubignac’s La pratique du théâtre

François Hédelin D’Aubignac, charged by Richelieu in the wake of the controversy over The Cid with creating a “normative manual of theatre practice,”55 worked between 1640 and 1657 on a text that set out the French Academy’s rules for theatre. The result systematically laid out a conceptual framework and practical guidelines that hew closely to Aristotle’s Poetics, providing the best-developed and most widely known articulation of seventeenth-century dramaturgy in France. Though nominally a text dedicated to explaining theatre practice, La practique du théâtre deploys a systematic theory of theatrical representation whose core concepts of verité and vraisemblance are applied to playwriting, staging, décor and acting. D’Aubignac’s notion of theatrical framing, as I will show, posits an absolute distinction between what is represented on stage and the real world, but fosters a resemblance between the two terms such that both “worlds” display a similar rational continuity described in terms of spatiotemporal unity and the logical concatenation of events.

Hélène Baby claims that D’Aubignac proposes a relationship of transparency

“between the imitated thing (the real) and the thing that imitates (the fiction),” and that since the theorist presses for an “effacement” of playwright, spectator and actor, in

D’Aubignac’s scheme “la pièce de théâtre doit devenir un véritable fragment du réel”

(the play should become a veritable fragment of the real).56 This assessment, however, assigns to D’Aubignac a notion of “the real” that is not operative in his text, and that

55 Martine de Rougement, La Vie Théâtrale en France au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris : Éditions Champion, 2001), 73.

56 Hélène Baby, “Observations sur La practique du theatre,” in La practique du théâtre (Paris: Honore Champion, 2001), 608.

35 grates against his repeated and explicit attempts to dissociate that which is depicted on stage from the world of facts. For D’Aubignac reality, or le grand Monde, is identified with the circumstances of staging the play: the actors, playhouse and spectators as such.

In order to avoid confusion, the grand Monde must never mix with the several, illusory

Mondes particuliers represented on stage.

In his chapter “On the Mixture of the Representation with the Truth of the

Theatrical Action,” D’Aubignac sets up a stringent division between the “truth of the

Stage Action” and “the Representation” that supports it. The former term is interpreted as “l’histoire du Poème Dramatique, en tant qu’elle est considérée comme véritable, et que toutes les choses qui s’y passent sont regardées comme étant véritablement arrivées, ou ayant dû arriver” (the story of the Dramatic Poem in so far as it is considered true, and as the things that happen there are regarded as having truly happened, or having ought to have happened), while the latter is given as “l’assemblage de toutes les choses qui peuvent servir à représenter un Poème Dramatique, et qui s’y doivent rencontrer, en les considérent en elles-mêmes et selon leur nature comme les Comédiens, les Décorateurs, les Toiles peintes, les Violons, les Spectateurs et autres semblables” (the assemblage of all the things that can serve to stage a Dramatic Poem, and that should be found there, considering them in themselves according to their nature as the Actors, the Decorators, the Painted drops, the Violins, the Spectators and other such things).57 The examples given by D’Aubignac of the latter term include, besides such entities, statements of fact that link “the Representation” to factual states of affairs:

“Mis que Floridor, ou Beau-Château fassent le personnage de Cinna, qu’ils soient bons ou mauvais Acteurs, […] qu’un Acteur passe derrière une tapisserie, quand

57 François Hédelin D’Aubignac, La practique du théâtre (Paris: Honore Champion, 2001), 85.

36 il dit qu’il va dans le cabinet du Roi; […] qu’il y ait des Spectateurs présents: qu’ils soient de la Cour ou de la Ville: […] toutes ces choses sont, à mon avis, et dépendent de la Représentation” (86).

(Supposing that Floridor, or Beau-Château play Cinna, that they be good or bad Actors, […] that an Actor passes behind a tapestry when he says that he’s going into the King’s chamber, […] that there be Spectators present, that they be from the Court or the City, […] all of these things, in my view, fall under the category of the Representation.)

Thus one is confronted in D’Aubignac with an implied distinction between “the truth” (vérité) and the real. The truth of the play is given to subsist in a less than strict historicity: a sense of having actually happened or “having ought to have happened”

(ayant dû arriver). The world in which actors go by their own names, however, is to be rigorously dissociated from this truth. “Je dis donc qu’il ne faut jamais mêler ensemble ce qui concerne la représentation d’un Poème avec l’action véritable de l’histoire représentée” (87) (I say then that one must never mix together that which concerns the representation of a poem with the true action of the story represented). This split between the truth that belongs to the object of stage representation, and that which belongs to the state of affairs comprised by its staging is articulated several times and at length in La pratique du théâtre. Writing “Of the Spectators and how the Poet should consider them,”

D’Aubignac compares theatrical representations to painted tableaux, which can be considered in two ways: first as a painting composed of contrived images and painterly conventions depicting “that which doesn’t exist at all” (tout ce qui n’est point), and second as the image of something “either true or supposed so” (soit véritable ou supposée telle) of which the “places are certain, the qualities natural, the actions indubitable, and

37 all the circumstances according to the order of reason.”58 For D’Aubignac, the same two- faceted analysis holds for theatre:

On peut du premier regard y considérer le Spectacle, et la simple Répresentation, où l’art ne donne que des images des choses qui ne sont point. Ce sont des Princes en figure, des Palais en toiles colorées, des Morts en apparence, et tout enfin comme en Peinture (78).

(One can, at first glance, consider in it the play and the simple representation, where the art presents only the images of things that are not. These are figures of princes, palaces in painted drops, visions of the dead, and everything, finally, as in a painting.)

This aspect is contrasted to that in which the vérité of the play consists:

Ou bien on regarde dans ces Poèmes l’Histoire véritable, ou que l’on suppose véritable, et dont toutes les aventures sont véritablement arrivées dans l’ordre, le temps et les lieux, et selon les intrigues qui nous apparaissent (79).

(Either one sees in these poems the true story, or what one supposes to be true, and of which all the adventures actually happened in the order, in the times and places, and according to the plots that we see.)

D’Aubignac consistently opposes the vérité of a play to states of affairs related to its representation. The facts of staging, for the theorist, provide the sharpest contrast between the two sorts of world, and therefore the best means of preventing their mixture.

But d’Aubigac does not limit this distinction to a separation of the vérité of the stage action from the facts of staging itself. He rather extends it to absolutely separate that which is represented on stage from the world at large.

In his section on “The preparation of incidents,” D’Aubignac propounds the need for events to be causally linked and warns against precipitous events for which an

58 “La première comme une peinture, c’est-à-dire, en tant que c’est l’ouvrage de la main du Peintre où il n’y a que des couleurs et non pas des choses; des ombres, et non pas des corps, des jours artificiels, de fausses élévations, des éloignements en Perspective, des raccourcissments illusoires, et de simples apparences de tout ce qui n’est point. La seconde et tant qu’il contient une chose qui est peinte, soit véritable ou supposée telle, dont les lieux sont certains, les qualités naturelles, les actions indubitables, et toutes les circonstances selon l’ordre et la raison.” D’Aubigac, La practique du théâtre, 77-8.

38 audience has not been prepared by prior events in the narrative. The sudden development of peripheral characters after a play’s climax, for example, alerts an audience to the playwright’s intervention, both undermining the play’s dramaturgical integrity and threatening the separation of stage and real worlds.

Le Théâtre est comme un Monde particulier, où tout est renfermé dans les notions de l’étendue de l’action représentée; et qui n’a point de communication avec le grand Monde, sinon autant qu’il s’y rencontre attaché par la connaissance que le Poète en donne avec adresse (201).

(The theatre is like an individual world, where everything is contained in the notion of the reach of the action represented, and which has no contact at all with the greater world, except insofar as it finds itself attached to it by an understanding that the poet declares.)

The distinction is thus extended to close the discrete, illusory worlds conjured on stage against the whole domain of facts. The prevention of confusion between the two appearances is doctrine for D’Aubignac, and motivates several of his practical instructions, shunning direct address to the audience (80-1), for example, and suggesting that the subjects of theatrical representation be derived from distant locales and historical epochs.

This last aspect of D’Aubignac’s dramaturgy applies spatiotemporal distance to reinforce the separation of Mondes particuliers from the grande Monde. Though sixteenth-century tragedies had been termed “miroirs des princes” for reflecting political actuality, for the academic dramaturgy of the late seventeenth century, the subjects of tragedy and comedy alike were to be drawn from remote historical or geographical sources.59 The subjects of classical tragedy were drawn from ancient or biblical sources in part to answer critics of theatre who pointed out the dangerous potential for false

59 The depiction of remote times and places, of course, did not prevent tragedians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from commenting upon recent history and current affairs.

39 seeming in theatrical mimesis. D’Aubignac forbids the actor from referring to present locales or events, saying “on ne souffrirait pas qu’il confondît la Ville de Rome avec celle de Paris, des actions si éloignées avec nos aventures présentés, et le jour de cette conjuration avec celui d’un divertissement public arrivé seize cente ans après” (87) (one should not suffer him to confuse the city of Rome with that of Paris, such distant actions with our present affairs, and the day of this conjuration with that of a public amusement sixteen hundred years later). According to the theorist, the implicit or explicit treatment of contemporary subjects was abandoned as ancient tragedy became more “noble” and

“serious;” in fifth-century Greek drama, “on ne les trouve point infectées de cette corruption, sinon dans les Prologues d’Euripide” (96) (they are not at all infected by this corruption, except in the prologues of Euripides). The mixture of real and represented events was pathological for classical French dramaturgy.

Moreover, D’Aubignac describes the evolution of comedy from the satyr plays of the City Dionysia to Terence as a process of shedding all reference to the world known to its public. Aristophanes first assigned pseudonyms to the contemporary objects of satyrical mockery, but this “fut jugée d’une aussi pernicieuse conséquence, et pareillement défendue” (90) (was judged to also be pernicious in its results, and was similarly banned). The “new comedy” of Terence, however, shed all reference to the world known to its audience:

De sorte que la Comédie n’étant plus qu’une production de l’esprit, reçut des règles sur le modèle de la Tragédie, et devint la peinture et l’imitation des actions de la vie commune. Alors la représentation en fut entièrement séparée, et tout ce qui se faisait sur le Théâtre, était considéré comme une histoire véritable, à laquelle ni la République, ni les Spectateurs n’avaient aucune part. On choisissait des aventures que l’on supposait être arrivées dans des pays fort éloignés, avec lesquels la ville, où se faisait la représentation, n’avait rien de commun. On prenait un temps auquel les Spectateurs n’avaient pu être, les Personnages ne prenaient aucun intérêt dans les affaires de ceux qui les venaient

40 voir, ni dans la société publique, et paraissaient agir seulement par la considération des choses dont le Théâtre portait l’image (90).

(Comedy being no longer anything but a production of the mind, it received rules from the model of Tragedy and became the painting and imitation of the actions of everyday life. Thus the representation was entirely separated from it and everything that took place on stage was treated like a true story in which neither the republic nor the spectators had any part. They chose affairs that one supposed to have taken place in a remote country with which the city where the play was done had nothing in common. They selected a time when the spectators could not have existed; the characters had neither interest in the affairs of those who came to see them, nor in public society, and seemed to concern themselves solely with matters of which the stage provided the image.)

This strict separation of the world known to spectators from the worlds represented on stage presents a challenge to another mandate of D’Aubignac’s dramaturgy: the cultivation of illusion. The audience, in order to reap the instructive and moral benefits of the theatre, should forget that they are watching Floridor or Beau-

Château perform and accept the “illusions agréables” of theatrical convention. To this end, D’Aubignac deploys the abstract notion of vraisemblance to articulate the link between the two types of world. Rather than drawing the contours of Mondes particuliers from the world at large directly, the theorist imbues them with qualities that resemble those of a priori notions central to rationalist philosophy: spatiotemporal uniformity, absolute unity and logical causal relations. In other words, D’Aubignac abstracts the link between the stage and factual worlds by assigning to verisimilar theatrical worlds the same attributes that rationalist philosophers assign to the world at large.

According to Hélène Baby, D’Aubignac’s notion of vraisemblance consists in two demands made of theatrical representations: one internal with respect to the world of the play (diagetic) and one referring outside to the world at large (mimetic). Internal vraisemblance, by this scheme, constrains the action of the play according to rules of

41 decorum (bienséance) and a sense of logical coherence possessed, and in a sense imposed, by the audience. The quasi-historical vérité of the tale and the unity of action, which, as we have seen, serves to regulate the boundaries of the stage world for

D’Aubignac, is posed as an internal demand for a reasonable concatenation of events.

D’Aubignac links this arrangement of events with a “nécessité de l’action.”60 The unities of time and place, however, are cast as external and mimetic of the world at large, for which twenty-four hour days (the classical limit for narrative duration) and physical limitations on movement hold sway.

While this analysis serves to point out the composite nature of D’Aubignac’s use of vraisemblance—a term never explicitly defined in La practique—there is reason to contest this internal/external division. For one, those qualities deemed internal to the play, namely vérité, decorum and logical necessity, are also those that directly depend on communal knowledge. The plausibility and historicity of the story presented and the decorum of represented action are acknowledged by D’Aubignac to depend on the culture and moral life (mœurs) of the audience; this requires internal qualities to refer outside of the play for their normative ground. Furthermore, the external, mimetic vraisemblance of spatiotemporal unity, as construed by Baby, is a copy not of the grand Monde outside of the play, in which events rarely confine themselves to single days or arbitrary spatial limits. Rather the abstractions gathered by D’Aubignac under the banner of vraisemblance signal the infiltration of seventeenth-century dramaturgy by a rationalist world picture. D’Aubignac, who understood the real world as opposed to the stage, recast the Aristotlean unities as rational principles that gave the same absolute continuity,

60 H. Baby, 637.

42 and logical coherence to the worlds conjured on stage as Descartes granted to the world of his natural philosophy.

Though he imports Aristotle’s dramatic theory more or less intact, D’Aubignac exhibits a wariness of received wisdom characteristic of his rationalist contemporaries.

He asserts that “les Regles du Théâtre ne sont pas fondées en autorité, mais en raison.

Elles ne sont pas établies sur l’exemple, mais sur le Jugement naturel” (26) (the rules of theatre aren’t founded on authority, but on reason. They are not established by example, but by natural judgment). Dramatic theory, then, submits to rational principles rather than to experience. A grasp of the subtleties of vraisemblance may be enhanced by instruction, but in the end “la raison naturelle suffisent pour juger de toutes ces choses”

(127) (natural reason is adequate to judge these things). Reason, moreover, helps the playwright plausibly (vraisemblablement) construct Mondes particuliers since the vérité of stage action also depends on depicting circumstances “selon l’ordre et la raison” (78)

(“according to order and reason”). As has been shown, vérité may consist in the belief that a story actually transpired (étant véritablement arrivées), but the rules of dramatic poetry allow for the playwright to improve on past events, and to show how things might have, or should have occurred (ayant dû arriver). The playwright, loath to depict the vagaries of natural human action and the disorder of everyday speech, is entitled, even obligated, to improve on nature. The stage “ne souffre rien d’imparfait: C’est où les manquements de la Nature, et les fautes des actions humaines doivent être rétablies”

(suffers no imperfections: it is where the deficits of Nature and the faults in human actions should be restored). Theatrical representations stand to “réforme ce que la Nature a de défectueux en ses mouvements” (472) (reform defects in nature’s movements), thus

43 they operate as models of reality as conceived by the rational and poetic mind of man, rather than copies of lived experience. The idealized worlds conjured in the thought experiments of rationalist philosophers had in this sense become a model for

D’Aubignac’s theory of theatrical representation.61

D’Aubignac thus prefers a priori rational principles to the direct imitation of observable phenomena as a basis for ordering the illusory worlds of the stage. His dramatic theory, in fact, applies fundamental tenets of rationalist epistemology to the proper imitation of the world on stage. As did Descartes and Malebranche, D’Aubignac believes that reason trumps sense experience; thus for him rational principles must determine the attributes of discrete stage worlds.62 Echoing the credos of rationalist philosophers, he ascribes to these worlds a thoroughgoing logical order that determines events, thereby granting them an absolute unity, logical coherence and spatiotemporal continuity.63 Furthermore, the invocation of imaginary, provisional worlds itself links

D’Aubignac’s dramaturgy to a common philosophical trope of seventeenth-century

France. As I argued above, though Descartes disavowed the plurality of worlds, he nonetheless found it useful to invoke the idea of separate worlds in his philosophy. Such imaginary worlds are ontologically indistinguishable from D’Aubignac’s Mondes particuliers.

In rationalizing Aristotlean principles, and in particular by making a set of abstract principles, rather than a naïve realist concept of the world, the basis of theatrical

61 Voltaire, in Candide, ridiculed Leibniz’ proposition that humanity occupied the best of all possible worlds, illustrating the overt dismissal of rationalist philosophy exhibited by some eighteenth-century materialists.

62 De Rougement, 78-9.

63 See John Cottingham, The Rationalists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 10-1.

44 mimesis, D’Aubignac reveals a strong reliance on the Cartesian world picture. Reason, being the faculty through which all dependable knowledge is discovered, not only founds the rules of theatrical practice for the theorist, it is the basis for understanding the world that theatre imitates. Just as Cartesian rationalism tasks the intellect with “analyzing the structure of the universe, in fact, of producing this structure with its own resources,”

D’Aubignac imposes abstractions on theatrical mimesis.64 The unity of place, appropriated from Aristotle, is mapped onto the abstract space of the stage; vérité is divorced from the world available to direct observation by the audience and remade as an idealized historicity; the unity of action comes to consist in a logical chain of events.

Though D’Aubignac’s Mondes particuliers are framed by an absolute separation from the singular world that is the object of rationalist natural philosophy, they are nonetheless regulated by the same principles that found that world: continuity and logical necessity.

Far from constituting a virtual segment of reality, theatrical “conjurations” amounted to separate illusory worlds congruent with the world of rationalist natural philosophy, whose founding abstractions served as their template.

b. Dubos’ Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture

If academic dramaturgy of the mid-seventeenth century relied on rationalist epistemology for abstractions on which to model stage worlds, by the early eighteenth- century dramatic theory had begun to participate in the ascendance of an empiricist deference to sensation. At the outset of the eighteenth century, numerous adversaries beset Cartesianism in France. Charges that Cartesian rationalism provided the

64 Ernest Cassirer, The Philosophy of Enlightenment, Frizt C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 51.

45 intellectual grounding for, and served as a gateway to, the reviled and allegedly atheistic philosophy of Spinoza proliferated after 1680. Responses to these attacks and debates over the extent of God’s intervention in the natural world developed into a “deepening double predicament of internal dissension and implication in the origins of radical thought” among Cartesians after 1700. Jonathan Israel contends that Cartesian philosophy ceded the “central arena” of debate in the first years of the new century to

“empiricism, Leibniz, Bayle and the Spinozists,” each of which offered a formula for the capacity of reason to grasp God’s role in nature.65

Though Newtonian experimental science and Locke’s empiricist philosophy became widely known after 1730, intellectuals on the continent knew of empiricism well before its popularization.66 One of the early points of contact with Lockean empiricism in France was Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos (1670-1742), whose 1719 Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture is both the most developed treatment of dramatic theory written in France between D’Aubignac and Diderot and one of the most influential aesthetic treatises of the century.67 During his time in London, Dubos made the acquaintance of John Locke, and empirical philosophy, in its repudiation of innate ideas and its espousal of the mediating function of the senses in forming knowledge, left an

65 Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 491.

66 Israel points to Leibniz’s debates with Samuel Clarke concerning Newton in 1715-1716, and argues that philosophical anglomanie “flowed from the breakdown of Cartesianism and Malebranchisme and the perceived urgent need by the 1720’s for more robust defences against the advancing Radical Enlightenment” embodied by Spinoza’s materialism (518). For the early publishing and translation history of Locke’s Essay in France, see also Jørn Schøsler, “L’Essai sur l’entendement de Locke et la lutte philosophique en France au XVIIIe siècle: l’histoire des traductions, des éditions et de la diffusion journalistique (1688-1742),” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 2001:04 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2001), 1-163.

67 Allan Megill, “Aesthetic Theory and Historical Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century” History and Theory, Vol. 17, No. 1. (February, 1978), 46-7.

46 indelible mark on Dubos’ aesthetic theory.68 Réflexions critiques exhibits a striking departure from the abstract mimetic schema deployed by D’Aubignac, rooted, as Dubos’ theory is, in the Lockean epistemological terms of discrete objects and sensory impressions. As the systemic worldview advanced by Cartesian rationalism lost currency in France, Dubos put forward a theory of dramatic representation stripped of appeals to logic, reason, or absolute distinctions. After Dubos, the classical template of abstractions in eighteenth-century dramatic theory gave way to an idealized sensory encounter with discrete objects of knowledge.

Ernst Cassirer casts Abbé Dubos’ Réflexions critiques as a signal event in

Enlightenment aesthetics that separates aesthetic judgment from the “discursive reasoning” that guided it in the classically-minded seventeenth century. Cassirer places

Dubos in the same line of development as Dominique Bouhours, whose 1687 La manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages de l’esprit (The Art of Thinking in Works of the Mind) develops the faculty of délicatesse (sensitivity) to explain the appreciation of beauty and opposes délicatesse to the austere exactitude of classical mimesis.69 In this context,

Dubos represents the “full development” of an evolution in aesthetics that would later produce the bourgeois sentimentalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but

Cassirer also points out the empiricist overtones of the Abbé’s psychologized aesthetics:

“…in this analysis of the aesthetic impression subject and object are treated as equally necessary factors. The more exact character of this causal relation and the participation

68 Dominic Désirat, Preface to Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (Paris: Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, 1993).

69 Dominque Bouhours, La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit (Paris: Vve de S. Marbre- Cramoisy, 1687).

47 in it of subject and object cannot be determined in advance by abstract considerations, but only by experience.”70 Such reliance on experience shows a sharp contrast with

D’Aubignac’s assertion that “les Regles du Théâtre […] ne sont pas établies sur l’exemple, mais sur le Jugement naturel.” The empiricist focus on knowledge a posteriori, according to Cassirer, is a tenet of Dubos’ methodology, as well as a hallmark of his aesthetic theory.

Dubos applies a premium to the sensory aspects of aesthetic experience, theorizing the subjective encounter with the art object along empiricist lines. For Dubos, the impact of painted and theatrical tableaux stems from the causal relationship between an object’s apprehension by sense and ensuing psychic modifications:

Comme l’impression que ces imitations font sur nous est du même genre que l’impression que l’objet imité par le peintre ou par le poète ferait sur nous ; comme l’impression que l’imitation fait n’est differente que l’objet imité feroit, qu’en ce qu’elle est moins forte, elle doit exciter dans notre âme une passion qui ressemble à celle que l’objet imité aurait pu exciter. La copie de l’objet doit, pour ainsi dire, exciter en nous une copie de la passion que l’objet y aurait excitée (9- 10).

(The impression these imitations make on us is of the same kind as the impression that the object imitated by the painter or poet would make; since the impression the imitation makes only differs from the impression the imitated object would make in that it is less strong, it should excite in our soul a passion that resembles that which the object imitated would have been able to excite. The copy of the object should, in a manner of speaking, excite in us a copy of the passion that the object would have excited.)

Dubos thus dispenses with the abstractions of spatiotemporal unity, logical progression and reason that found D’Aubignac’s fictive worlds and replaces them with a psychological theory of aesthetics beholden to Lockean empiricism. Locke, in the 1693

Essay Concerning Human Understanding, claimed that “Our senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things,

70 Cassirer, 302.

48 according to those various ways wherein those objects do affect them; […] they from external objects convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions.”71 Locke, moreover, limits our knowledge of the outside world to the deliverances of the senses

(II.II.3) and limits the sources of all human ideas to either sensation or reflection (II.I.2), which latter term is the result of “operations of the mind about its other ideas” (II.IV.1).

For Dubos as for Locke, the subjective modification brought on by encounters with external objects can only be understood as the direct or indirect effect of sense, and makes no demonstrable appeal to natural judgment or innate ideas. Mimesis ceases to function as the concept that founds entire imaginary worlds, and instead operates at the level of discrete objects of knowledge in the world and their psychic impact.

Dubos’ treatment of vraisemblance furthermore manifests a departure from the classical invocation of logical necessity and abstract reason towards a concretized theory of knowledge. Whereas D’Aubignac had elaborated a composite vraisemblance consisting in a quasi-historical vérité (“regardées comme étant véritablement arrivées, ou ayant dû arriver”) and the reasonable concatenation of events, a verisimilar

(vraisemblable) event, for Dubos, is simply that which is “possible dans les circonstances où on le fait arriver” (80) (possible within the given circumstances). This interpretation, like that of D’Aubignac, does not task theatre with depicting events with absolute historical accuracy. However for Dubos this historical laxity is not justified by the thought that the representation might improve upon nature, but rather the fact that it grants painters and dramatic poets license to mix marvelous (merveilleux) elements with historical fable in order to better hold the attention of the audience (81). According to

71 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1995), II.I.3, 59-61.

49 Dubos, the negotiation between the merveilleux and the vraisemblable is the work of great poets, and deviations from the possible, probable or strictly historical are to be forgiven except in the case of a work “qu’on donne pour contenir exactement la vérité des faits” (80) (that is given to contain exactly the truth of the facts). Thus Dubos’, like

D’Aubignac, imposes a loose standard of historicity on theatrical subjects, but one that is recommended, in contrast with his seventeenth-century predecessor, by a functional demand rooted in a psychological theory of audience reception.

In Dubos’ reworking of vraisemblance one can identify two tendencies that comprise a disengagement from a world picture founded on rational abstractions. First,

Dubos explains vraisemblance with reference to psychological states and subjective experience of tableaux, rather than through an exposition of concepts. Vraisemblance is opposed to le merveilleux, and the extreme end of each pole is said to undermine the aesthetic experience: “D’un côté, les hommes ne sont point touchés par les événements, qui cessent d’être vraisemblables […]. D’un autre côté, des événements, si vraisemblables qu’ils cessent d’être merveilleux, ne les rendent guère attentifs” (81) (On one hand, men aren’t moved by the events that cease to be verisimilar […]. On the other side, events that are so verisimilar they cease to be marvelous hardly keep their attention).

Though he concisely defines the term, Dubos’ explication of vraisemblance is shored up with subjective descriptions. Plays that violate the verisimilar demand “ne touche que par surprise” (82) (only move us by surprise), and their faults are “sensible à tout le monde” (81) (are felt by everyone). Second, while Dubos allows for embellishment of historical subjects, he nonetheless espouses a standard of historicity that adheres to commonly acknowledged fact rather than to an ideal or abstract notion of history.

50 Claiming that nothing destroys vraisemblance more than the knowledge that events actually transpired otherwise, Dubos urges playwrights to hew to “faits historiques”

(historical facts):

Je sais bien que le faux est quelquefois plus vraisemblable que le vrai, mais nous ne réglons pas notre croyance touchant les faits sur leur vraisemblance métaphysique, ou sur le poid de leur possibilité, c’est sur la vraisemblance historique (82).

(I well know that the false is at times more plausible than the true, but we do not set our belief in the events of the play according to their metaphysical probability or on the basis of their possibility, but rather on their historical verisimilitude.)

Vraisemblance, then, is evaluated according to the spectator’s felt experience and a fealty to historical states of affairs; the metaphysical is barred from consideration in favor of subjective impressions, and a collective notion of historicity. The tendency in Dubos to reject abstractions that link real and represented worlds prompts him to renovate classical dramaturgy’s approach to illusion with a likewise subjectivist approach.

Dubos maintains that “le plaisir que nous avons au théâtre n’est point l’effet du l’illusion” (145) (the pleasure we have at the theatre is not at all the result of illusion), because its imitations affect the mind only superficially. The effects of painted and staged objects remain restricted to “l’âme sensitive” (the sensitive soul), where they quickly disappear, leaving the mind untroubled (10). For Dubos, it is because the senses themselves are not deceived that reason does not take the theatrical representation for the real: “l’impression faite par l’imitation n’est pas sérieuse, d’autant qu’elle ne va point jusqu’à la raison pour laquelle il n’y a point d’illusion dans ces sensations” (10) (the impression made by the imitation isn’t serious, in as much as something doesn’t reach the faculty of reason when there is no illusion in these senses). Reason, therefore, is dissociated from the subjective modifications produced by theatre, since for it to be

51 tricked the senses would have to first be deceived, and this is impossible since in the theatre “rien n’y fait illusion à nos sens, car tout s’y montre comme illusion” (145)

(nothing there deceives our senses, since everything is shown there as an illusion).

Dubos asserts that the spectator’s capacity for rational thought, his wits, are never threatened by the stage representation:

L’affiche ne nous promis qu’une imitation ou des copies de Chimène et de Phèdre. Nous arrivons au théâtre, préparés à voir ce que nous y voyons, et nous y avons encore perpétuellement cent choses sous les yeux, lesquelles d’instant en instant nous font souvenir du lieu où nous sommes, et de ce que nous sommes. Le spectateur y conserve donc son bon sens malgré l’émotion la plus vive (146).

(The poster promises us just an imitation or copies of Chimène and Phèdre. We arrive at the theatre prepared to see what we see there, and we also have there continually a hundred things before our eyes, which from moment to moment remind us where we are and what we are. The spectator therefore keeps his wits despite the liveliest emotion.)

However, Dubos does not deny that painted tableaux and theatical décor are capable of deceiving the senses: “les tableaux peuvent bien quelquefois nous faire tomber en illusion” (146) (tableaux can sometimes make us fall into an illusion). The classical separation between the real and represented worlds, then, is both reinforced through a normative judgment (people of good sense are not deceived at the theatre) and destabilized by a submission of reason to the senses, which can at times be deceived.

In Dubos’ empirically-minded renovation of key terms in classical dramatic theory, one can observe two elements of a significant development in eighteenth-century

French dramaturgy. For one, the distinction between the real world of facts and the illusory worlds of the stage is preserved and endorsed, but has begun to undergo significant modifications. The separation of these domains ceases to be the result of an absolute distinction between two types of world both founded on a universal set of abstractions. Instead theatrical (and painterly) mimesis is deployed to distinguish

52 between discrete objects and their copies, as well as between the impressions real objects would make and the superficial impressions caused by their imitations. The failure of imitated objects to pass for their real counterparts is demonstrated, but not justified, by the observation that one encounters staged and painted images only as imitations. In

Dubos’ aesthetic theory one sees the formalization of the closure of stage worlds against reality: the distinction between fact and fiction remains operative, but ceases to require elaboration or practical measures to prop it up. The proof that the pleasure of theatre does not consist in illusion is simple: otherwise no one would enjoy seeing a play or regarding a painting for a second time (147). Dubos agrees with D’Aubignac that the subjects of tragedy should be drawn from ancient history, but this is not to guard against confusion between the real and its copy, but rather in keeping with a sense of the gravity proper to tragedy.

Martine de Rougement ascribes Dubos’ dismissal of illusion to a rhetorical tactic meant to evade critics of theatre who claimed the power of illusion to be dangerous, but it may also be seen to result from the influence of Lockean empiricism on Dubos’ aesthetics.72 Dubos refrains entirely from invoking the abstractions required to absolutely separate Mondes particuliers from the grand Monde of reality, but does not contest this split. “The world” as a concept is stripped of utility for empiricist partisans, since it cannot be presented all at once to the senses, and the knowledge it can provide to Dubos’ aesthetics is consequently limited. Dubos refers not to worlds, which would recall the fanciful speculations of Descartes and Leibniz; instead the language of discrete “objects” sets the parameters of painterly and theatrical representation. As I will show in chapter

72 Martine de Rougement, 75.

53 three, the discourse of the stage object would come to be integrated into French theatre architecture reform in the second half of the century.

This emergence of the stage object in Dubos’ theory of theatrical representation signals a second key element of mutation in Enlightenment dramatic theory: the alignment of theatre spectatorship with the mind’s encounter with objects of knowledge.

Dubos’ appropriation of the discourse of the object may, at first glance, appear to mimic

Locke’s empiricist psychology, but the structure of the mind’s direct encounter with a discrete object of perception proliferated, as well, in rationalist natural philosophy.73

Optics, as I will elaborate in chapter four, loomed large in works in natural philosophy by

Descartes and Newton, and optical treatises deployed a language of external objects and their interactions with sensory faculties. Thus Dubos’ renovation of the theatrical frame ought to be read not simply as the aesthetic correlate of a broad shift from rationalist to empiricist approaches to theorizing knowledge but rather as a significant step towards the appropriation by Enlightenment aesthetic theory of epistemelogical models.74 The appearance of the language of the object in French dramatic theory and later in French theatre architecture theory, therefore, may be attributed as much to Dubos’ reluctance to invoke discredited rationalist abstractions (spatiotemporal uniformity, absolute transparency to reason) in describing theatrical framing, as to the specific influence of

Lockean sense-based theory of understanding.

73 See, for example, Part 1, paragraphs 4 and 48 of Descartes’ Les principes de la philosophie, Vol 1, 193- 4, 208-9.

74 De Rougement, for example, finds in Dubos’ position that the effects of theatrical illusions entertain only the mind, failing to penetrate the body or soul reason to believe that the Cartesian mind-body split informed his theory (75).

54 In contrast to D’Aubignac, who demanded that stage worlds be regulated by abstract rational principles similar to those that founded the Cartesian world picture,

Dubos describes the difference between real (réel) objects and their copies in terms of the relative strength of impression made on the subject. That is to say that Dubos eliminates the discrete, illusory worlds of seventeenth-century dramaturgy; he theorizes the difference between the mind’s sensory impression by real objects of knowledge and the spectator’s sensory impression by imitated objects as one of degrees of potency, profundity and duration, rather than one of type. Paintings and plays no longer instantiate a world apart for contemplation, but frame discrete objects whose status as imitation is understood by a mature, experienced mind. As Diderot’s writing on drama in the 1750s makes clear, this development marks a trend towards an elision of the distinction between staged and factual states of affairs that is characteristic of dramatic theory in the second half of the century.

c. Diderot’s Entretiens sur le fils naturel

Dubos’ empiricist wariness of the abstractions that found seventeenth-century academic dramaturgy prefigures the skepticism towards speculative metaphysics that gained momentum among French philosophers towards the middle of the century.75

75 The degree to which English empiricism undermined the epistemological foundations of Cartesianism in mid-eighteenth-century France has been a recent point of contention for the historiography of Enlightenment philosophy. The waning dynamism of Cartesian rationalism at the turn of the century, the philosophical component of the Anglomanie of the 1730s and 1740s, and the sensationist thought of the Abbé de Condillac (1714-1780) have bolstered the common assessment that the empiricism of Newton and Locke “overshadowed the revolutionary ideas of a Descartes or a Fontenelle” by mid-century. Rom Harré and others contest this view, citing studies of the centrality of Cartesian metaphysics to mid-century materialist philosophy and arguing that sensationism was not highly esteemed by Diderot and d’Alembert. While there is reason to believe that the Cartesian emphasis on reason and abstraction remained important to mid-century materialist philosophy, there is little doubt that the intellectual celebrity in France of Newton and Locke between 1730 and 1750 marginalized self-avowed disciples of Descartes. See Peter

55 Though the materialist philosophy espoused by Diderot, d’Alembert and d’Holbach preserved a belief in the fundamental order, unity and knowability of the universe, these philosophers gravitated markedly towards the aims, methods, and discourse of Newtonian natural science.76 Natural phenomena were to be exposed and recorded through close observation and repeatibility, errors of sense reduced to minutiae, and abstract universal claims shelved for being of little use. The proper scope of philosophical inquiry was reduced from one encompassing the world as a uniform entity to that of discrete objects within that world.

This renovation of philosophical method is manifested in the dramatic theory that accompanied the advent of bourgeois drama in the third quarter of the eighteenth-century.

Whereas Dubos in 1719 implicitly displays his allegiance to Locke by incorporating the categories of empirical psychology into his aesthetic theory, Diderot, in 1757, identifies empiricist natural philosophy itself as a model for theatrical, in this case operatic, representation:

Des hommes de génie ont ramené, de nos jours, la philosophie du monde intelligible dans le monde réel. Ne s’en trouvera-t-il point un qui rende le même service à la poésie lyrique, et qui la fasse descendre des régions enchantées sur la terre que nous habitons?77

(Recently men of genius have brought the philosophy of the intelligible world into the real world. Will no one be found to render the same service to lyric poetry, bringing it down from enchanted regions to the earth that we inhabit?)

Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York & London: Norton, 1966), 11-2; Ron Harré, “Knowledge” The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science, G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter ed. (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 35-47.

76 Peter Jimack, “The French Enlightenment I: science, materialism and determinism,” in Routledge History of Philosophy Vol. 5: British Philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment (New York: Routledge, 1996), 228- 50.

77 Diderot, Entretiens sur le fils naturel in Œuvres Complètes de Diderot (Paris: Herrman, 1981), 85.

56 As Downing A. Thomas has argued, Diderot’s mandate that theatre depict le monde réel, the world as directly experienced by theatrical spectators, reflects the fact that

“knowledge itself had undergone a profound shift,” and that this shift made new demands on the theory of drama.78 The theatre of French high Enlightenment, obligated to imitate a world whose representation within philosophy had itself been overhauled, was prompted to provide a new account of its relationship with that world.

Diderot’s dramatic theory, however, does not repudiate seventeenth-century dramaturgy. Diderot and his contemporaries carried forward vraisemblance, illusion and the unities of time, place and action, the central tenets of D’Aubignac’s mimetic system.

Rather, the paradigm shift that culminates in the 1750s amounts to an attack on the baroque-era dissociation of stage presentations from the real world. Unlike D’Aubignac, who militated against confusion between theatrical Mondes particuliers and the grand

Monde, Diderot and Mercier held that theatrical representations should directly imitate the social and natural worlds. Diderot, embracing such factual/fictive confusion in his

Entretiens sur le fils naturel, employs a narrative framing device that injects purportedly real events into a fictional scenario. At the same time, however, Diderot advances an ideal notion of the spectator’s relationship with the stage that forbids interaction between salle and scène, reproducing on stage what Fried calls “anti-theatrical” absorption in painting, and conforming to the complete separation of stage presentations from “objets voisins” (neighboring objects) that defines painterly tableau.79 In this section I will argue that Diderot both endorses the formal, academic separation between stage presentations

78 Downing A. Thomas, “Architectural Visions,” 53-5.

79 Pierre Frantz observes that the separating function of a painting’s frame is a crucial element of tableau as defined in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert. L’esthetique du tableau, 43.

57 and the world of facts, and adopts aspects of Dubos’ psychologized and empirically- minded aesthetics. In combining aspects of the theatrical frames deployed by

D’Aubignac and Dubos, Diderot undermines the distinction between the real world and its stage imitation, aligning the spectator’s relationship to the stage with the philosopher’s contemplation of natural phenomena.

Several features of the 1757 Entretiens (E) and the 1758 De la poésie dramatique

(PD), indicate that Dubos’ aesthetics informs Diderot’s understanding of the effect of theatre on audiences. Dubos’ Reflexions was widely read in the mid-eighteenth century and was praised by Voltaire.80 Diderot, in both his Salon of 1761 and his Pensées détachées sur la peinture, echoes several of Dubos’ opinions on painting, revealing

Diderot’s receptivity to Dubos’ psychological theory of art.81 Like Dubos, Diderot understands theatre to be linked more closely with painting than with the novel, going so far as to argue that historical painting is “le fondement de l’art dramatique” (PD 354) (the foundation of dramatic art). This observation conforms to an emphasis on the sensory, especially visual, aspects of theatre that pervade Diderot’s dramatic theory. For Diderot,

“une pièce est moins faite pour être lue que pour être représentée” (E 84) (A play is made less for reading than for staging), and Frantz has argued, moreover, that Diderot’s advocacy to replace “coups de théâtre,” or heightened bits of stage action that punctuate plot reversals, with tableaux, demonstrates the influence of sensationist philosophy in

80 Of Dubos’ Reflexions, Voltaire wrote, “Ce qui fait la bonté de cet ouvrage, c’est qu’il n’y a que peu d’erreurs et beaucoup de réflexions vraies, nouvelles et profondes. Ce n’est pas un livre méthodique ; mais l’auteur pense et fait penser.” (What makes this book valuable is that there are few errors and plenty of reflections that are true, new and profound. It’s not a methodical book, but the author thinks and provokes thought.) Quoted in Désirat, preface to Réflexions critiques.

81 Diderot, Salon de 1761, 220 and Pensées détachées in Diderot Œuvres Tome IV: Esthétique – Théâtre (Paris: Laffont, 1996), 1020, 1053.

58 eighteenth-century aesthetics.82 Diderot’s privileging of the theatrical tableau, which he defines as “une disposition de […] personnages sur la scène, si naturelle et si vraie, que, rendue fidèlement par un peintre, elle me plairait sur la toile” (E 92) (an arrangement of characters on stage so natural and so true, that, if accurately rendered by a painter, would be pleasing on canvas), suggests that he, like Dubos, understands the effect of theatre on the spectator to be a chain of modifications that begin with raw sense impressions.

Diderot also follows Dubos in making the cultivation of audience attention a sign of artistic merit. A successful nude painting, for example, “fixera l’attention, s’il est bien dessiné” (E 131) (will fix the attention, if it is well drawn), regardless of the time or place in which it is shown. Spectatorial attention is invoked, furthermore, to validate the

Aristotlean unities of theatre:

Dans le société, les affaires ne durent que par de petits incidents, qui donneraient de la vérité à un roman, mais que ôteraient tout l’intérêt à un ouvrage dramatique: notre attention s’y partage sur une infinité d’objets différents; mais au théâtre, où l’on ne représente que des instants particuliers de la vie réelle, il faut que nous soyons tout entiers à la même chose (E 86).

(In society, affairs transpire only in small incidents, which would give truth to a novel, but that would deprive a dramatic work of all its interest: our attention is divided there among an infinity of different objects, but in the theatre, where one stages just particular instants of real life, we should focus entirely on the same thing.)

Diderot, then, infers that theatre should present moments of real life on stage, and merges aspects of classical dramaturgy with Dubosian psychological aesthetics. He does not, however, cast spectatorial attention in the central role that it plays for Dubos. In De la poésie dramatique, Diderot rather explicates the notion of intérêt (intrigue), which he understands to rely on the characters of a play, who “forment le nœud sans s’en apercevoir, que tout soit impénétrable pour eux; qu’ils s’avancent au dénoûement sans

82 Frantz, L’esthéthique du tableau, 4-5.

59 s’en douter” (PD 368) (form the crux without knowing it; everything is impenetrable for them; they are propelled to the denouement without suspecting it). Thus the spectators, who are nothing but “des témoins ignorés de la chose” (PD 368) (ignored witnesses of the thing), empathetically take on the characters’ interest in the play’s events, but remain separated from those events. Though Diderot refers at times to the psychological state of theatre spectators, in explaining the intérêt of a piece, he echoes D’Aubignac both by invoking a formal separation between salle and scène, and by assigning the maintenance of intérêt to diagetic states of affairs.

Diderot’s explanation of illusion, moreover, displays his indebtedness to Dubos while also revealing a rationalist penchant for regularity and abstraction. Diderot’s explanation of illusion translates Dubos’ polarity between the vraisemblable and the merveilleux into mathematical terms:

Me permettra-t-on de parler un moment la langue des géometres? On sait ce qu’ils appellent une équation. L’illusion est seule d’un côté. C’est une quantité constante qui est égale à une somme de termes, les uns positifs, les autres négatifs, dont le nombre et la combinaison peuvent varier sans fin, mais dont la valeur totale est toujours la même. Les termes positifs représentent les circonstances communes, et les négatifs les circonstances extraordinaires. Il faut qu’elles se rachètent les unes par les autres (PD 356).

(May I be permitted for a moment to speak the language of geometers? We know what they call an equation. Illusion is alone on one side. It is a constant quantity equal to a sum of terms, some positive, others negative, of which the number and combination can endlessly vary, but of which the total value is always the same. The positive terms represent common circumstances, and the negatives extraordinary circumstances. They should offset each other.)

Diderot’s “geometric” explanation of illusion stops well short of advancing a mathematically ordered dramaturgy, but his invocation of geometry cannot be discounted as arbitrary. Diderot was strongly influenced by the Abbé de Condillac, who, despite his dogmatic anti-Cartesianism, maintained that “one could reason in metaphysics and in the

60 moral sciences with as much precision as in geometry.”83 Also, given that Diderot, whose own theory of knowledge came to rest on an organicist materialism, believed that

“thought was […] a totally physiological function, an automatically determined result of sense impressions,”84 it can be surmised that he would expect the function of theatrical illusion to conform to a quasi-mathematical regularity.

Though illusion, for Diderot, operates like a mathematical constant and “n’est pas volontaire” (is not voluntary) for spectators, it is constant only “dans un homme qui juge de différentes productions, et non dans des hommes différents” (PD 357) (for a man who judges different productions, and not for different men). In other words, though the function of illusion can be explained as a formulaic combination of common and extraordinary events in a play, its effects can be judged only subjectively. The variance among individual cases seems not to undermine Diderot’s belief in an abstract, if not entirely graspable, order that founds theatrical representation. Diderot’s dramatic theory, then, like the materialist philosophy of his contemporaries, shows a syncretic tendency: it accomodates both abstract principles and a highly variegated notion of individual experience. The spectator emerges as a psychological and sensitive – that is to say, a

Dubosian – subject, even as academic, rationalist dramaturgy continues to supply the concepts that undergird theatrical representations. In a further syncretism, D’Aubignac’s distinction between the real world and what is represented on stage is evidently both formalized and virtually elided in Diderot’s dramatic theory.

83 Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, trans. Hans Aarsleff (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3. On the friendship of Diderot, Condillac and Rousseau see Isabel F. Knight, The Geometric Spirit: The Abbé de Condillac and the French Enlightenment (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1968), 9-11.

84 Jimack, “The French Enlightenment I,” 246.

61 Diderot articulates the conceptual frame of theatrical representation by linking the presentations of his new tragédie bourgeoise to the real world as known to spectators with absolute proximity, directness and fidelity. So committed is he to the notion that theatre should depict le monde réel, that his framing device for Le fils naturel presents the play not as an image of contemporary social relations, but rather as an account of recent factual events. Diderot recounts meeting Dorval – who is presented as the author of the play, and who expresses Diderot’s justifications for the play in the Entretiens – while in

Canton after the 1756 publication of the sixth volume of the Encyclopedia. Dorval explains to Diderot that he wrote the play at the behest of his now deceased father, who wanted Dorval to “conserver la mémoire d’un événement qui nous touche, et de le rendre comme il s’est passé” (E 16) (to conserve the memory of an event that touches us, and to render it as is it happened).

Diderot’s framing device for Le fils naturel promotes an ideal of theatrical representation that consists of virtual identity between reality and its staged copy.

Dorval’s play is to be acted out by the family that is its subject, each person interpreting themselves, in the same house where the principal events originally transpired. “Les choses que nous avons dites, nous les redirions” (E 16) (The things we said, we would say again). The identification of object and imitation is heightened, also, by the elision of the frame separating the audience from the actor. Dorval’s father intends for the play to transmit the tale of his illegitimate son’s sacrifice to future generations within the family, who will eventually take on the roles themselves. Diderot, moreover, as the interloping spectator, blurs the factual/fictive line by sneaking into the room where the play is first performed: “J’entrai dans le salon par la fenêtre; et Dorval, qui avait écarté tout le monde,

62 me plaça dans un coin, d’où, sans être vu, je vis et j’entendis ce qu’on va lire, excepté la dernière scène” (E 17) (I entered the room through the window, and Dorval, who had spread everyone out, put me in a corner where, without being seen, I saw and heard that which you will read, except for the last scene). The spectator becomes, like the eighteenth-century libertine, a furtive intruder into sheltered domestic space.

Diderot recounts losing, at times, his sense of the ontological barrier between the play and the reality it was meant to depict:

La représentation de l’histoire de Dorval avait été si vraie qu’oubliant en plusieurs endroits que j’étais spectateur, et spectateur ignoré, j’avais été sur le point de sortir de ma place, et d’ajouter un personnage réel à la scène (E 83-5).

(The staging of Dorval’s story was so true that, forgetting in several places that I was a spectator, and an unnoticed spectator, I came close to leaving my place and adding a real character to the stage.)

But he does not leave his chair, and the identification of the real object with its theatrical copy remains an ideal that cannot be realized in practice. Diderot was to lay out a version of this principle for the actor years later in the Paradoxe sur le Comédien, but in Le fils naturel, it remains implied.85 The framing narrative serves as a demonstration not only of the need for theatre to show the real world, but also of the limits of such mimetic immediacy. Dorval’s self-dramatization cannot be played to completion, since Dorval’s father Lysimond is recently deceased at the time of the production. The family casts one of Lysimond’s friends in the role, but they are overcome with emotion during the final scene in which he appears, and are unable to finish the play: “La douleur, passant des maîtres aux domestiques, devint générale, et la pièce ne finit pas” (E 83) (The pain, passing from masters to servants, became general, and the play could not conclude).

85 Diderot dispels the notion that the best actors are those with naturally heightened sensibility, and therefore the ability to truly feel the emotions they are playing as they play them, adding that “rien ne se passe exactement sur la scène comme en nature.” Diderot, Paradoxe sur le comédien, in Diderot Œuvres Tome IV: Esthétique – Théâtre (Paris: Laffont, 1996), 1378.

63 Lysimond’s recent death and the groundswell of emotion that it prompts in the actors interrupt Dorval’s play. This feature of Diderot’s account vividly demonstrates the persistence of D’Aubignac’s rigid distinction between the grand Monde and Mondes particuliers in eighteenth-century dramatic theory. The halting of the play signifies a formal distinction between the real, which is subject to mortality, and the mimetic, which may be endlessly reiterated. Lysimond’s death peels Dorval’s ideal representation away from the reality to which it clings in all other respects. It interrupts a performance that otherwise works to erase the frame of theatrical representation completely.

Diderot recounts trying to calm his troubled emotions after the performance and wanting to believe that “Tout ceci n’est qu’une comédie” (All of this is just a play).

However, he remembers that the events portrayed were widely known to be true, and cannot, furthermore, account for the “douleur profonde dont ils avaient été pénétrés à la vue du vieillard qui faisait Lysimond” (E 84) (profound pain that penetrated them upon seeing the old man who played Lysimond) in the absense of their factual basis. The play

Diderot’s narrator has seen, of course, is not like any other. It deliberately courts the confusion that classical dramaturgy takes measures to avoid, mixing object and imitation, actor and character. But Diderot is far from pushing for the repeal of D’Aubignac’s split between stage representations and factual states of affairs. Le fils naturel, is, after all, a fictional work, and Dorval—though some maintain he is based on d’Alembert—is a fictional character. 86 Most importantly, the unavoidable gap between the world of

Dorval’s play and that in which Lysimond has died is linked by Diderot to the cascade of sentiment that stops the play. It is the sensibility of the spectator and the combination of

86 John Pappas, “D’Alembert et le Fils naturel,” in Essays on Diderot and the Enlightenment in Honor of Otis Fellows, ed. John Pappas (Geneva: Droz, 1974).

64 this faculty with the passage of time that brings the enterprise down. Diderot thus reinforces the classical dissociation between the real world and its theatrical imitation by testing its limitations. Le fils naturel deliberately collapses factual and imitated worlds, while serving as a limit case for the dramatic theory that mandates such a collapse.

Diderot’s dramatic theory is thus invested in a notion of l’âme sensitive, but the aspect of Diderot’s debt to epistemology that most directly concerns this study is that of his application of the Enlightenment discourse of the external, material object to the domain of spectatorship. As has been noted above, Diderot understands theatre to be foremost an art of the senses. The philosopher once famously plugged his ears while rewatching a favorite play in order to gauge the emotional impact of the merely visual aspects of the performance. He explains in the Entretiens that “choses, même vraisemblables” (things, even plausible) ought to be “tantôt de montrer, tantôt de dérober aux spectateurs” (E 147) (now shown to the spectators, now hidden) in an explicitly sensory encounter. Diderot’s preoccupation with the sensory dimension of theatre conforms with the materialist understanding of human perception. The Entretiens is accordingly permeated with the same language of external objects deployed within

Dubos’ psychological aesthetics. Dorval, as we have seen, speaks of the spectator’s attention, which is divided among many objects in the world, but may be concentrated in the theatre “entirely on the same thing.” Diderot, however, doesn’t treat the presentations of theatre as just another object offered to sensory mediation, he implies that theatre in itself conforms to a subject-object structure.

In response to a question about the proper subjects of the comédie sérieux, one of his new dramatic genres, Dorval explains that conditions, rather than characters, should

65 be in focus: “Jusqu’à present, dans la comédie, le caractère a été l’objet principal, et la condition n’a été que l’accessoire; il faut que la condition devienne aujourd’hui l’objet principal, et que le caractère ne soit que l’accessoire” (E 144) (Up until now, in comedy, character has been the principal object and conditions have been just a secondary concern; today, conditions ought to become the principal object, and character be just secondary). While Diderot uses the word objet in the sense of goal or function elsewhere in the Entretiens, here it takes on the sense of an object of view, consideration or inquiry.

Strikingly, the term “object” is used interchangeably with the “subjects” of drama, which are implied to line up with the traits of conventional comic characters (E 143). This sudden switch from “subject” to “object” in designating that which is represented onstage amounts to an appeal to epistemological categories on Diderot’s part in an attempt to reform the protocols of theatrical representation.87 The “object” of theatre no longer simply means the goal of moral education, nor that which is depicted in a strictly visual way in scenic décor; for Diderot the object has come to identify that which is depicted on stage with the paradigmatic object of natural philosophy in general. Theatre itself, according to this usage, apprehends an object as though the art comprised an autonomous philosophical subject in itself.

The diversification in meaning of the stage “object” in the Entretiens shows how

Diderot draws on philosophical models in theorizing the spectatorial relationship with the stage. This interpretation is bolstered by the fact that the theorist inbues Dorval with a comtemplative outlook on the natural world. At the end of the first interview, Diderot’s narrator recounts that

87 The language of the “principal object” also shows Diderot to be hewing closely to Dubos’ aesthetics.

66 Dorval observait les phénomènes de la nature qui suivent le coucher du soleil; et il disait: “Voyez comme les ombres particuliers s’affaiblissent à mesure que l’ombre universelle se fortifie… Ces larges bandes de pourpre nous promettent une belle journée… […] On n’entend plus dans le forêt que quelques oiseaux, dont le ramage tardif égaye encore le crépuscule… Le bruit des eaux courantes, qui commence à se séparer du bruit général, nous annonce que les travaux ont cessé en plusieurs endroits, et qu’il se fait tard (E 97-8)”.

(Dorval observed the phenomena of nature that followed the sunset, and said: “See how the individual shadows weaken as the universal shadow strengthens… These wide bands of purple promise us a beautiful day… […] One only hears now a few birds in the forest, whose late song further cheers the twilight… The sound of running waters, which begin to separate from the general noise, tell us that work has stopped in several places, and that it grows late.”)

The theatrical auteur is thus disposed to observe and interpret the spectacles of nature. In the Entretiens Dorval embodies a twofold link between the practices of Enlightenment natural philosophy and theatrical representation. First, Dorval engages with nature solely through the two senses that constitute the spectator’s encounter with the stage: vision and hearing. The sensory manifold of nature is to be seized primarily by sight and sound, just like the object of theatrical performance. Second, the natural encounters that punctuate the Entretiens repeatedly invoke an analytic separation of sensory data and the isolation of discrete phenomena, hallmarks of natural philosophy in the Newtonian mold. Dorval describes “individual shadows” and sounds which “separate from the general noise” while later his voice in the narrator’s imagination “lifts itself above” the sounds of the storm. The sensing subject that beholds nature isolates individual visual and aural phenomena in order to better judge them. As I will show in the third chapter, the technique of visual and aural isolation will come to play an important role in the theatre architecture reform that commenced in the 1750s.

* * *

67 Diderot’s dramatic theory endorses a liberal adherance to classical rules but overturns D’Aubignac’s separation of stage and factual worlds. The world in its social and natural dimensions provides the proper object of theatrical representation, and drama offers a virtual segment of the contemporary world to its spectator. This paradigm shift in dramatic theory, to be sure, did not translate into an immediate upheaval in playwriting or acting. The drama of Diderot and Mercier saw limited success in the second half of the century, and only partly displaced the more established tragic and comic genres that reigned at the major Parisian theatres.88 Diderot’s dramatic theory, however, did participate in the diversification of the modes and objects of spectatorship that marks the eighteenth century, a process that was an important element in the emergence of the

Habermasian public sphere. When considered in the context of literary essays that proliferated during the reign of Louis XV, Diderot’s merging of the respective objects of theatrical representation and philosophical inquiry may be read as the counterpart to a process by which the figure of the spectator came to represent techniques of observation and critical inquiry applied to the world at large.

Both Dorval and the narrator of the Entretiens survey natural phenomena, applying a spectatorial gaze to a range of objects. As Descartes had done in his early writings, the alignment of nature with spectacle initially rehearses the Renaissance trope of the theatrum mundi. But Diderot’s implied comparisons between natural philosophy and theatrical viewing conform to a distinctly eighteenth-century construction of subjective knowledge for which the figure of the bourgeois spectator is a crucial reference. The Spectator of Addison and Steele, published in England between 1711 and

88 Martine de Rougement, 21-52.

68 1714 and in several French editions between 1714 and 1755, captures the self-conscious positioning of the individual vis-à-vis objects of study:

My face is likewise very well known at the Grecian, the Cocoa-tree, and in the theatres both of Drury-lane and the Hay-market. I have been taken for a merchant upon the exchange for above these ten years, and sometimes pass for a Jew in the assembly of stock-jobbers at Jonathan’s. In short, wherever I see a cluster of people, I always mix in with them, though I never open my lips but in my own club. Thus I live in the world rather as a Spectator of mankind, than as one of the species, by which means I have made myself a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant, and artisan, without ever meddling with any practical part in life.89

Thus Addison, an exemplary bourgeois public subject in the Habermasian mold, assigns a performance function to the spectator.90 Addison is a spectator in the world by virtue of his social mobility and visual presence, but he cannot at the same time speak or engage

“practically” as an individual. Spectatorship – as a semi-withdrawn mode of encountering the social and natural worlds – is linked, by virtue of this mode of passive observation, with a bourgeois appropriation of reason characteristic of the Enlightenment.91

Addison’s spectatorial manifesto echoes Descartes’ proclamation that he had prior “been a spectator in this theatre which is the world, but I am now about to mount the stage, and

I come forward masked.”92 In each case, the rational subject exists in and is present to the world, but for Addison the constraints imposed on his utterances are more stringent – he cannot take stage like Descartes, masked or otherwise.

89 Joseph Addison, The Spectator, (London: J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper, March 1, 1711), 4.

90 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 38.

91 Habermas links the spectatorial public subject with reason in this way: “Psychological interests also guided the critical discussion (Räsonnement) sparked by the products of culture that had become publicly accessible: in the reading room and the theatre, in museums and concerts. Inasmuch as culture became a commodity and thus finally evolved into “culture” in the specific sense (as something that pretended to exist merely for its own sake), it was claimed as the ready topic of a discussion through which an audience- oriented (publikumsbegozen) subjectivity communicated with itself” (29).

92 Descartes, Vol. 1., 2.

69 The eighteenth-century spectator is in the world as a silent observer partially because he has knowingly assumed the status of the object, as well as the subject, of spectatorship. According to Habermas, “In the Tattler, the Spectator, and the Guardian the public held up a mirror to itself; it did not yet come to a self-understanding through the detour of a reflection on works of philosophy and literature, art and science, but through entering itself into ‘literature’ as an object.”93 These journals thus anticipated the widespread concern of late eighteenth-century theatre architects with “intervisibility,” the ability of theatrical spectators to view other audience members as well as the stage. After the opening of the new Théâtre-François designed by Peyre and De Wailly in 1782, an anonymous pamphleteer was to complain that the darkly painted recesses of the loges

“n’est pas un petit inconvénient dans un pays où les femmes, ainsi que cette espèce d’hommes qui leur ressemblent (& font la plus grande partie des spectateurs), vont moins au spectacle pour en jouir, que pour être vus” (is no small inconvenience in a nation where the women, and also the sort of men that resemble them (and compose the largest part of the spectators), go to the theatre less to enjoy it than to be seen).94 One may read this concern as manifesting the “insistent, ubiquitous, and increasingly visible presence” of the figure of the spectator that has been linked to the development of the public into its late-century status as a political agent.95

The emergence of the public into self-awareness through engagement with printed and performance culture involved both the abstraction of “objects,” and a concomitant

93 Habermas, ibid., 43.

94 “Observations sur la Nouvelle Salle du Théâtre François,” BNF EST. Rt 2518, 13.

95 Suzanne Rodin Pucci “The Spectator Surfaces: Tableau and Tabloid in Marivaux’s Spectateur Français,” Yale French Studies, No. 92 (1997) 151. See also Jeffrey Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theatre and French Political Culture 1680-1791 (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1999).

70 estrangement of subjects increasingly defined by the universal faculty of reason. As the spectator developed into a figure to whom were attributed techniques for properly framing discrete segments of the social and natural worlds, the spectator him or herself came to be abstracted like one of those objects.96 The public intellectual, accordingly, became an anonymous critical subject defined in part by a passive spectatorial function.

Nowhere is this notion of spectatorship better expressed than in the first page of

Marivaux’s Le Spectateur Français.97 Marivaux warns the reader immediately that “ce n’est point un auteur que vous allez lire” (it is not an author that you are going to read),98 but rather a passive recorder of thoughts determined by objects in the world.

Ne serait-il pas plus curieux de nous voir penser en hommes? En un mot, l’esprit humain, quand le hasard des objets ou l’occasion l’inspire, ne produirait-il pas des idées plus sensibles et moins étrangères à nous, qu’il n’en produit dans cet exercice forcé qu’il se donne en composant ? […] Je ne sais point créer, je sais seulement surprendre en moi les pensées que le hasard me fait naître, et je serais fâché d’y mettre rien du mien. Je n’examine pas si celle-ci est plus fine, si celle-là l’est moins; car mon dessein n’est de penser ni bien ni mal, mais simplement de recueillir fidèlement ce qui me vient d’après le tour d’imagination que me donnent les choses que je vois ou que j’entends, et c’est de ce tour d’imagination, ou pour mieux dire de ce qu’il produit, que je voudrais que les hommes nous rendissent compte, quand les objets les frappent.99

(Would it not be more curious to see us think as men? In a word, does not the human mind, when chance objects or the occasion inspire it, produce ideas more

96 According to Adorno and Horkheimer, “Abstraction, the instrument of enlightenment, stands in the same relationship to its objects as fate, whose concept it eradicates: as liquidation. Under the leveling rule of abstraction, which makes everything in nature repeatable, and of industry, for which abstraction prepared the way, the liberated finally themselves become the “herd” (trupp), which Hegel identified as the outcome of Enlightenment.” Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 9.

97 Marivaux’s Le Spectateur Français was published periodically between June 1721 and September 1724, and in single volume re-editions in 1727, 1728, 1752, 1754 and 1781.

98 Pierre de Marivaux, Le Spectateur Français in Œuvres Complètes de Marivaux, de L’Académie Française t. 9 (Paris: Dautherau, 1830), 3.

99 Marivaux, Le Spectateur Français, 3-4.

71 sensible and less foreign to us than it produces in the forced exercise of composing? […] I do not know how to create, I only know how to be surprised by thoughts that chance causes to be born in me, and I would be loathe to insert any of my own. I don’t concern myself with whether this one is more fine, or that one is less so; my design is to think neither well nor poorly, but simply to faithfully record what comes to me after the turn of imagination given to me by the things I see or that I hear, and it is of this turn of imagination, or rather of what it produces, that I would like men to give account when objects strike them.)

The Spectateur Français, like its English counterpart, is presented in an analogous act of withdrawal, but one that reduces his authorial uniqueness to a combination of chance encounters and the autonomous process of imagination. Marivaux relates to the world according to the same model of objects, sense impressions and subjective modifications that underlies Dubos’ aesthetic theory. However, whereas Dubos takes the Lockean theory of the mind’s relationship to the world as a model for his reception theory,

Marivaux adopts the techniques of the theatrical spectator as the basis for his relationship to his social and cultural surroundings.

At mid-century, philosophes thought of theatre as a quasi-philosophical pursuit.

The merger of philosophical inquiry and theatrical practice in the work of Voltaire and

Diderot demonstrates the convergence of two mutually reinforcing cultural developments of the eighteenth century: 1) the influence of empiricist aesthetic theory based on sensory apprehension of discrete objects, and 2) a public sphere that increasingly saw itself imbued with the sovereign faculty of reason. Diderot’s Dorval embodies both components of mid-century philosophico-spectatorial contemplation by treating theatre as a sort of philosophical prosthesis: a practice of seizing objects present in the world, rather than those of ancient history, and rendering them to the senses in order to promulgate useful truths. Diderot’s dramatic theory locates the point at which the aesthetic and

72 rational faculties coalesce in the figure of the enlightened theatrical spectator, before the philosophical function of the theatre itself was hardened into dogma by Diderot’s admirer, the playwright and essayist Louis-Sébastien Mercier.

Mercier opens his 1773 Du théâtre, ou Nouvel essai sur l’art dramatique by affirming the twin aims of drawing theatre closer to truth and to its edifying vocation:

“Le spectacle est un mensonge; il s’agit de le rapprocher de la plus grande vérité. Le spectacle est un tableau; il s’agit de rendre ce tableau utile”100 (The theatre is a lie; it is a matter of drawing it towards the greatest truth; the theatre is a tableau; it is a matter of making this tableau useful). Vérité had been an important criterion in French dramatic theory since D’Aubignac, but by the 1770’s the meaning of truth in drama itself had accommodated itself to a sensationist formulation of knowledge. Mercier insists that

“L’effet du théâtre consiste en impressions, et non en enseignements. […] Ce ne sont pas là des ombres métaphysiques, des distinctions subtiles de l’école” (1152) (The effect of theatre consists in impressions, and not in teachings. […] These are not metaphysical shadows, no subtle scholarly distinctions.) The truth of theatre is sensate, and is immediately conveyed to the spectator who now does not ponder abstract moral lessons so much as he or she is swayed by emotional pulses. In this way Mercier submits the educational value of theatre to its sensory qualities; as was the case with Dubos and

Diderot, this privileging of sense is concomitant with the elision of the distinction between the world at large and the stage representation.

For Mercier, this distinction is so thoroughly eroded that theatrical spectatorship may stand in for experience itself. “Le théâtre est fait,” he writes, “pour suppléer au

100 Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Du théâtre, ou Nouvel essai du l’art dramatique in Mon Bonnet de Nuit suivi de Du Théâtre, Jean-Claude Bonnet ed. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1999), 1141.

73 défaut d’expérience de la jeunesse” (1155) (The theatre is made to compensate for the lack of experience of the youth). Accordingly, a reformed playwright takes for its objects the actual constituents of the social world.

Son théâtre, qu’il élargit avec la pensée, deviendra aussi étendu que celui de l’univers; ses personnages seront aussi variés que ceux des individus qu’il aperçoit; il méditera en écrivain sensé, en peintre fidèle, en philosophe, et songeant qu’il est au dix-huitième siècle, il laissera dormir les monarques dans leurs antiques tombeaux; il embrassera d’un coup d’œil ses chers contemporains, et trouvant des leçons plus utiles à leur donner dans le tableau des mœurs actuelles, au lieu donc de composer une tragédie, il fera peut-être ce que l’on appelle un drame (1155-6).

(His theatre, which he expands with thought, will become as extended as that of the universe; his characters will be as varied as those of the individuals he sees; he will meditate as a sensible writer, a faithful painter, a philosopher, and considering that he’s in the eighteenth century, he will let the monarchs lie in their ancient tombs. He will embrace in a glance his dear contemporaries, and finding more useful lessons to give them in the tableau of current morals, instead of thus composing a tragedy, he will create possibly that which one calls a drama.)

The scope of worldly experience, then, is matched with the range of possible theatrical subjects, a precept which, besides showing Mercier’s debt to Diderot’s dramatic theory, suggests that the spectatorial and philosophical regard had become interchangeable. The same techniques of careful observation and critical inquiry that made Addison and

Marivaux into spectators of the world, by the 1770s interpolate theatrical auteurs, and by extension their audiences, with a philosophical mindset.

Daniel Rabreau, citing Mercier’s utopian novel, L’an 2440, remarks that “at the end of the Ancien Régime, the images of literary or familiar language show that city- dwelling citizens apprehended the world that surrounded them with “l’optique du théâtre.”101 This optique, or viewpoint, belongs to a national culture swept by

101 “A la fin de l’Ancien régime les images du langage littéraire ou familier montrent que le citoyen-citadin appréhende le monde qui l’entoure avec ‘l’optique du théâtre.’” Daniel Rabreau, Le Théâtre et l’embellissement des villes, xviii.

74 théâtromanie, and for which the role of the spectator signified the relationship of the subject to the world at large, in addition to the cluster of techniques and performances attributed to those who frequented the large Parisian theatres. The expansive and diverse understanding of spectatorship offered up by essayists like Addison, Marivaux and

Mercier himself has been linked to the formation of an increasingly empowered public polity, but this phenomenon also reflects a mutation in epistemological belief that traverses the eighteenth-century, one that increasingly looked to the mechanics of sense as the material foundation of all useful knowledge.

This epistemological trend, as I have attempted to show, drew dramatic theory into discursive proximity with philosophy in the mid-eighteenth century. The ideal spectatorial encounter and the ideal apprehension of an object as described by the philosophes sustained a pattern of mutual reference and imitation. Such reciprocity is evident in Condillac’s 1746 Essai sur l’origin des connaissances humaines, wherein the spectatorial experience serves to illustrate the filtering operation of the soul, or attention.

Condillac notes that the experience of theatrical illusion is only possible through selective attention, since in the theatre “une multitude d’objets paroissent se disputer” (a multitude of objects seem to fight) for the spectator’s attention.

Il y a des momens où la conscience ne paroît pas se partager entre l’action qui se passe et le reste du spectacle. Il sembleroit d’abord que l’illusion devroit être d’autant plus vive, qu’il y auroit moins d’objets capables de distraire. Cependant chacun a pu remarquer qu’on n’est jamais plus porté à se croire le seul témoin d’une scène intéressante, que quand le spectacle et bien rempli.102

(There are moments when consciousness does not seem to be divided between both the stage action and the rest of the theatre experience. It would seem right off that illusion should be livelier if there were fewer distracting objects. It is,

102 Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines: ouvrage où l’on réduit à un seul principe tout ce qui concerne l’entendement (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1924), 2.I.5.

75 however, within everyone’s experience that we never so strongly feel ourselves to be the only audience of a captivating scene as when the house is full.) 103

Here the spectatorial encounter with the stage is exemplary of attention to objects in general; the example of the theatre is expressly given as “evidence,” and not in a metaphorical register.104 While the dramatic theory espoused by materialist philosophers clearly relied on concepts made known through the work of John Locke, Isaac Newton, and their continental interlocuters, it should also be acknowledged that spectatorial techniques provided material for the elaboration of aspects of the conscious mind itself.

As I will detail in my third chapter, the mechanics of sense and techniques for separating discrete objective fields gestured at by Condillac would become preoccupations of the theatre architecture reformer of the 1750s, 60s and 70s. In the following chapter, however, I will explain how the eighteenth-century French enthusiasm for experimental sciences applied spatial practices and spectatorial techniques common to theatrical performance to the popular understanding of the natural world.

103 Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Understanding, Hans Aarsleff trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 2.I.5.

104 Ibid., 2.I.6.

76 CHAPTER 2

EXPERIMENTAL PHYSICS LECTURE DEMONSTRATIONS AND THE

ARCHITECTURE OF EXPÉRIENCE IN ENLIGHTENMENT FRANCE

I always picture nature to be a great show resembling the Opera. From where you are seated at an Opera, you do not see the stage such as it really is; the decorations and machines are disposed to give a delightful effect at a distance, and all the wheels and weights that cause the movements are not in view. You don’t worry yourself much to know how it is all performed. Some machinist might possibly lurk in the pit who would occupy himself about a flight that seemed extraordinary, and would venture absolutely to puzzle out the whole contrivance of it. You surely see that this machinist resembles the philosophers.

-Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, 1686

This therefore is the end of my vexations, this the accumulation of my desires: today the doors of the Royal College of Navarre are opened up to those curious about matters of physics; a new theatre for experiments is open whence natural laws and phenomena will be explained for so many years; and— something I hardly ever might have dared to hope—it falls first to me, with your benevolence of course, to ascend this most honored platform.

-Jean-Antoine Nollet, 1753

In March of 1784, Louis XV’s secrétaire d’État à la Maison du Roi, the Baron de

Breteuil (1730-1807), undertook to place the Chair of Experimental Physics of the

Collège de Navarre under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences. This position had been installed by Royal lettre patente in 1753 and granted to France’s most prominent experimental physicist, the Abbé Nollet (1700-1770), before passing to Mathurin Jacques

Brisson.105 In a letter detailing his intent to the Rector of the Université de Paris,

Breteuil noted that despite fetching a daily attendance of some six or seven hundred

105 Les Collèges Français, 16e-18e Siècles (Paris: Institut national de recherche pédagogique, 2002), 288.

77 auditors—a figure surpassing that of every other class at the school—the professor of experimental physics was paid a paltry one thousand livres per year. From this sum, moreover, the professor needed to pay for upkeep to his machines and for any new ones that needed to be acquired. Breteuil proposed to give the physics chair over to a member of the Academy of Sciences, and to increase its endowment by three thousand livres, part of which would defray the costs of maintaining a cabinet of instruments.106

Breteuil’s plan was never implemented, however, due to the reaction it provoked from the Université de Paris administration.107 A memorandum issued in response refutes many of Breteuil’s claims and upbraids him for failing to appreciate the injury such a usurpation would cause the venerable Collège de Navarre. Not only would the proposal humiliate the faculty, it would entrust the teaching position to an academician who might not appreciate the moral dangers of physics instruction.108 The memorandum in fact shows that some in the university administration harbored ambivalence, if not outright resentment, toward the Experimental Physics Chair, which had been foisted on the college by Louis XV. The physics professor, it explains, teaches only eighty one- hour classes per year, as compared to some 450 two-and-one-quarter-hour classes taught by his peers in philosophy. He is paid twenty livres per hour of class, in contrast to

106 “…le Roi étant en son conseil, a ordonné et ordonne qu’à l’avenir la Chaire de Physique experimentale au Collège de Navarre ne sera confieé, comme elle l’est à present qu’a l’un des membres de l’Academie des Sciences, et la presentation du Professeur de ladit Chaire sera faite à Sa Majesté par le Superieur dudit Collège Royale de Navarre, veut et entend Sa Majesté que les appointemens dudit professeur soient et demeurent fixés a compter de ce jour à la somme de trois mille livres en sus de la part d’Emerite dont le Professeur actuel jouit, au moyen des qu’elles sommes ledit Professeur sera chargé de l’entretien des Machines necessaire.” Letter dated March 13, 1784. Sorbonne Archive, Carton 15, no. 60.

107 Les Collèges Français, 288-9.

108 The memorandum remarks, “Dans un siècle ou le Materialisme est si repandu, qui sçait dans quels ecarts un Phisicien téméraire pourait donner” (In a century in which materialism is so pervasive, who knows to what errors a rash physicist might be given)? “Memoire Sur le Projet d’arrêt du Conseil Communiqué à l’Université par M. Le Baron de Beteüil.” Sorbonne Archive, Carton 15, no. 61.

78 roughly three livres for other professors, even though the work of the philosophy faculty is “à la fois plus pénible et plus utile”109 (at once more strenuous and more useful).

The University of Paris mémoire reveals the ambivalence that met experimental physics in the 1780s. The spectacular nature of physics instruction added to skepticism about the course’s merit. In response to Breteuil’s claim that the experimental physics course is the most attended at the college, the mémoire counters that

La curiosité y en attire même quelque fois de l’espéce de ceux dont Buchanan se plaignoit que son école etoit obsedée: Ecce tibi erronum totas ex urbe phalanges, des gens qui ne viennent pas pour apprendre de la Phisique, mais pour voir des Machines, dont l’appareil a quelque chose de Magique à leur yeux, et pour passer le temps. Cette consideration aurait peut être du empécher l’auteur du projet de faire tout valoir le grand nombre des auditeurs. Ce ne seroit pas une chose admirable, que, dans une ville immense, où il y a tant de gens oisifs, un Spectacle assez curieux qui ne coute rien et qui est le seul de son espéce, attirât un peu la foule.110

(Curiosity attracts them—sometimes the same types that Buchanan complained haunted his school: Ecce tibi erronum totas ex urbe phalanges—people who don’t come to learn physics, but to see machines, the device of which has something of magic in their eyes, and to pass the time. Perhaps this consideration ought to have prevented the author of the project from making so much of the grand number of attendees. It is not such an impressive thing that, in an immense city where there are so many idlers, a somewhat curious show that costs nothing and that is the only one of its type attracts a crowd.)

According to the University Rector, the attendees of the experimental physics course at the Collège de Navarre did not pursue knowledge. This criticism has a fine edge: the attendees are “des Spectateurs, ou, si l’on veut, des auditeurs” (spectators, or, if you please, auditors). Hardly a cohort of dedicated students, this crowd “des personnes de tout âge et de tout état” (of persons of every age and condition) went to the class for their

109 Ibid.

110 Buchanan is likely James Buchanan, an American grammarian and school master. “Ecce tibi erronum totas ex urbe phalanges” translates loosely to “behold you have all the vagabond phalanxes from the city.” Ibid.

79 amusement.111 The academic scorn for experimental physics took on a decidedly antitheatrical character, linking the physics course with magic, which conjured associations of superficiality—if not false seeming—and supernatural malevolence.112

This broadside against experimental physics instruction discloses a special feature of French eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural history: the theatricality that permeated the empiricist current of Enlightenment. While public displays of natural phenomena – especially those of air pressure, gravitation and electricity– enjoyed great popularity and disseminated scientific knowledge to audiences of every rank and social class, they were also suspected in some quarters of duplicity and vacuousness. It was difficult to separate enlightened science from potentially deceptive art. Jean-Jacques

Rousseau, author of the exemplary statement of Enlightenment antitheatrical sentiment, was vary also of publicly performed experiments.113 He called the workshop of the Abbé

Nollet, France’s most esteemed physicist, “a laboratory of magic,” warned that “it is impossible for the human senses to differentiate between a magic trick and a miracle,” and derided experimental physics as “l’art d’arranger agréablement des brimborions” (the

111 Breteuil and the author of the University mémoire concurred that the physics course attracted the young and old. Sorbonne Archive, Carton 15.

112 Martin Puchner names as antitheatrical dread’s recurring themes “the immorality of public display, of arousing the audience, and, most importantly, of those who professionally practice the art of deception.” Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 1. See also Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Magic carried a complex set of denotations in the middle of the century. According to the Encyclopedia, it could be subdivided into natural and supernatural forms. Magie naturelle could be thought of in both a mundane and superficial (un peu approfondie) sense as the secrets of nature uncovered in all manner of human vocations. But the common use of the term (magie proprement dite) referred to celestial and ceremonial black magic that was “n'est autre chose que l'amas confus de principes obscurs, incertains & non démontrés, de pratiques la plûpart arbitraires, puériles, & dont l'inéfficace se prouve par la nature des choses” (nothing other than the confused mass of obscure, uncertain and unproven principles and of mostly arbitrary and puerile practices whose ineffictiveness is proven by the nature of things). Encyclopédie (9:853).

113 See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert and Writings for the Theatre: The Collected Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Vol. 10 (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2004).

80 art of pleasurably arranging trinkets).”114 This attitude toward the display of physical phenomena was not reserved for lowly popularizers of science. Nollet was named to the

Academy of Sciences in 1739, and in 1744 he performed experiments for the court of

Louis XV and tutored the Dauphin in physics before becoming the first occupant of the

Chair of Experimental Physics at the Collège de Navarre from 1753 to 1770.115

The antitheatrical critique of a highly esteemed science also points to a link between the aesthetic mutation outlined in my first chapter and French reformist theatre architecture. While my principle historical object is theatre architecture reform from

1748 to 1784, my overarching aim remains to depict the movement’s part in the concurrent realignment and approximation of the representational frames of philosophy and theatre. In my first chapter, I argued that the broad shift in theories of knowledge espoused by French philosophers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries prompted a reformulation in dramatic theory. As reason was displaced as the starting point for knowledge in general and data generated by the senses a posteriori took its place, the formal distinction between the factual world and the objects of theatrical representation receded into the background of dramatic theory. Diderot imagined a theatrical practice that aimed to represent the world precisely as it appeared to bourgeois spectators. Both he and Mercier assigned theatre the task of representing the present world in its apparent truth as though the uses of theatre and philosophy were identical.

114 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Letters Written from the Mountain,” trans. Christopher Kelly and Judith R. Bush, The Collected Works of Rousseau Vol. 9 (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2001) 175, 179; Jean Torlais, Un Physicien au Siècle des Lumières: L’Abbé Nollet 1700-1770 (Paris: Sipuco, 1954), 232.

115 Torlais, 54-5.

81 This mutation in dramatic theory was propelled by an empiricist tendency in

French philosophy of the eighteenth century.116 Aesthetic theorists including the Abbé

Dubos and philosophers such as Condillac concurred with Locke that knowledge could arrive in the mind only through the senses, though reason still played a role in assembling knowledge out impressions. As Kant was to argue in the second edition of his Critique of

Pure Reason, “[e]xperience never gives its judgements true or strict but only assumed and comparative universality;”117 thus the late-Enlightenment dismissal of the impervious distinction between the real world and stage representations fit with French sensationist dispositions. Theatrical tableaux were thought to generate mental impressions that differed from those that arose directly from the world only by degrees of profundity.

Empirically-minded intellectuals founded dramatic theory on sense impressions and discrete objets rather than of absolute, rationally-formulated distinctions and all- encompassing systematic formulations. In chapter one, I sketched the consequences of such sensationism in mid-century French dramatic theory, but Mercier’s 1773 claim that

“l’effet du théâtre consiste en impressions, et non en enseignements” (theatre’s effect consists in impressions, not in teachings), serves to remind of the permeation of dramatic theory by empiricist psychological formulations in the second half of the century.118

116 It is important not to exaggerate this tendency. Rom Harré has effectively shown that the view that late French Enlightenment can be reduced to the progressive adoption of Lockean sensationism fail to account for strong rationalist currents that prevailed, especially in the later work of D’Alembert. D’Alembert’s mathematically inclined mechanistic naturalism indeed harkens back to a rationalist faith in the innate human powers of reason. However, for the purpose of my argument, it is necessary to show merely that the intellectual climate of mid-century France favored an empiricist/sensationist theory of knowledge to one that overwhelmingly espoused rationalist foundationalism. See Rom Harré, “Knowledge” in The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science, G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter eds. (Cambridge UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 35-47.

117 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J.M.D. Meiklejohn, (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), B 4, 137.

118 Mercier, Du théâtre ou nouvel essai sur l’art dramatique, (Paris: Mercure de France, […]), 1148.

82 Sensationism also maintained a mutually supportive relationship with the experimental method central to natural philosophy after Newton. Locke and Newton concurred that rationlist systems called for the imposition of provisional constraints, preferring the direct, particular knowledge that came from careful observation and experiment.119 In this chapter I will show how the empiricist bent in natural philosophy helped generate a paratheatrical tradition of experimentation, which played a complementary role in a wider mutual alignment in French intellectual life between the aesthetic frame that bounded theatrical representation and the frame that supported enlightened thought about the machinations of nature. In order to prepare the way for my later comparison between the abstract space of optics and theatre architecture, my procedure here will be to suggest that a theatrical spatial practice—a spatially navigated social function akin to theatrical spectatorship—accumulated around the culture of experimental lecture demonstrations.

The practice of experimental physics, no less than sensationist aesthetics, placed sense experience at its theoretical foundation. The French word for experiment, expérience, indicates a seamless conjuncture of active and passive approaches to gathering knowledge a posteriori, but the procedures that distinguished contrived experiment (experimentum) from generalized experience (experientia) incorporated performative temporal structures and attracted a social space like the one that coagulated around theatrical amusements. I contend that as natural philosophy embraced

119 Newton’s oft-repeated credo, “hypotheses non fingo” (I feign no hypotheses), signals one of his key contributions in cleaving experimental physics from metaphysics. Newton believed that only propositions that had direct support in experiments belonged to experimental philosophy. The Principia: mathematical principles of natural philosophy, trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman assisted by Julia Budenz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 943.

83 experimental physics and came to frame discrete aspects of nature, it availed itself of theatrical techniques of representation in order to make discrete natural effects coherent.

Because classical academic dramaturgy had already formalized a theory of discrete verisimilar worlds (D’Aubignac’s mondes particuliers), the theatrical frame fit snugly around a scientific practice for which discrete experimental findings provided the sturdiest material for knowledge.

Thus, just as new dramatic genres began to enclose the world present to French spectators in a theatrical frame, a simultaneous evolution in natural philosophy brought the natural world before the mind through a set of theatrical practices and performative structures. The experimental lecture-demonstrations performed by the Abbé Nollet and his peers amount to a genre of paratheatrical performance that confounded the distinction between real and represented states of affairs. The resulting production and dissemination of scientific knowledge help explain the way theatre architects took account of and helped form the practices of the bourgeois spectator. The conjugation of optical and theatrical space that I will detail in my fourth chapter was made possible by a mode of theatrical spectatorship that modeled the mind’s encounter with the world. Thus the spectacles of natural phenomena that proliferated during the middle of the eighteenth century forged a link between Enlightenment epistemology and the social dimension of the performing arts. The theatre architecture reform movement in France occurred while performance practices helped diffuse scientific knowledge, and while the natural world provided objects of para-theatrical representation. As a means of enforcing a certain spectatorial encounter, therefore, theatre architecture reform applied itself to the needs of

84 a spectator whose observational techniques had already been cast in the mold of natural philosophy.

I. The Development of Experimental Physics in French Natural Philosophy and Public Life

A detailed account of experimental physics practice in Enlightenment France would exceed the constraints of this chapter. Nonetheless, before making the case that the Abbé Nollet’s lecture demonstrations were part of a paratheatrical tradition, it is necessary to sketch the history of French experimental physics of which Nollet was the most prominent eighteenth-century figure. This discussion will also provide an occasion to comment on the variation in meanings of expérience in the French philosophical lexicon. During the eighteenth century, expérience expanded from a designation for sundry types of practical experience and added a meaning specifically denotative of physical experiment. The plural des expériences and the construction faire expérience

(as opposed to avoir expérience) referred to a material practice in physics increasingly subject to discursive and institutional formalization.120

French rationalists including Descartes and Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) made frequent appeals to experience in their philosophical writings. A glance at Descartes’

Discours de la méthode reveals the importance of experience in several matters. For example, the perpetual circulation of blood in the body is proven “fort bien par l’expérience ordinaire des chirurgiens”121 (quite well by the ordinary experience of surgeons). The interaction of light with the membranes of the eye, according to the

120 Jean-François Féraud, Dictionaire critique de la langue française (Marseille, 1787-88), B197a.

121 René Descartes, Discours de la Méthode (Paris: Victor Cousin, 1824), 179.

85 Dioptrique, could also be examined by anyone willing to dissect the eye of an ox, remove its outer tissue, and install it in the wall of a darkened chamber. Descartes explains that by way of this procedure, “on […] peut faire l’expérience de plusieurs choses qui confirment ce qui est ici expliqué”122 (one can experience several things that confirm what is explained here). In the former case, surgical observation produces knowledge of the circulatory system as a by-product of normal vocational practice, while in the latter, experience is “made” (faire) through a knowledge-seeking intervention. In both cases experience of this sort veered close to the notion of empirique, which denoted a doctor’s practical expertise.

In both formulations, expérience sits ambiguously between two valences of the term that were recognized among seventeenth-century philosophers—experience as generalized world knowledge and experience as the result of a contrived operation. In the mid-thirteenth century Roger Bacon had delineated between experientia, which stood for mundane first-person knowledge of particular entities shared by animals and humans, and experimentum, which instead conveyed principles that ordered such knowledge into principles that applied to multiple entities.123 As Christian Licoppe notes in his study of the development of experimental practice in enlightenment France, by the mid- seventeenth century, these two types of experience had settled into a relationship of generality and particularity:

Les expériences de Pascal apparaissant donc sous la forme de récits concernant la manière dont la nature s’est comportée en certaines circonstances singulières et artificielles (experimentum), dont l’ensemble cautionne la légitimité d’énoncés portant sur la manière dont la nature se comporte en général (experientia). Cette

122 René Descartes, Dioptrique, 19n. Cited from ARTFL Database.

123 Roger Bacon, The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, trans. Robert Belle Burke, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1928) 583-634.

86 distinction héritée de l’aristotélianisme est classique dans la tradition philosophique du début du XVIIe siècle.124

(Pascal’s experiences/experiments thus appear in the form of accounts concerning the way nature behaves in certain singular and artificial circumstances (experimentum), the whole of which supports the legitimacy of statements made about the way in which nature behaves in general (experientia). This distinction inherited from Aristotelianism is classical within the philosophical tradition at the beginning of the seventeenth century.)

The seventeenth-century French Enlightenment negotiated a split between the meanings of “expérience” that roughly correlates with the separate denotations of “experience”

(experientia) and “experiment” (experimentum) in English. Expérience qua experientia was common to daily life, whereas expérience qua experimentum “n’est pas accessible à tous, et […]établit comment le monde se comporte en une occasion donnée”125 (is not accessible to everyone, and […] establishes how the world behaves in a given occasion).

The repetition of experimental knowledge, whether as implied by Bacon’s alignment of experimentum with multiple entities or in the reiterative structure of the given occasion, adhered to uses of expérience that connoted intervention and artifice. As an examination of the eighteenth-century experimental practice will show, the association of contrivance and repetition would become instrumental to Enlightenment knowledge production.

Licoppe tracks the formalization of expérience qua experimentum as the prime source of proof among a growing community of natural philosophers in Enlightenment

France and England in the late seventeenth century. During this period experiments attained the status of proof for descriptions of the natural world, and became the basis for persuasion of and communication among a circle of savants. As reproducibility became a

124 Christian Licoppe, La Formation de la Practique Scientifique: le discours de l’expérience en France et en Angleterre (1630-1820) (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1996), 22.

125 Ibid., 23.

87 validating standard for experiments, experimental philosophers sought out and cited repeat experimental performances in the presence of learned elites.126 Demonstrations of experiments not only served as a means of disseminating or promoting knowledge, but had a vital function in the constitution of scientific fact. The repeated performance of experiments therefore stood in a central position vis-à-vis the production and validation of knowledge before social and political elites, and the requirements associated with such performances by extension joined the conditions for the discursive formation of scientific knowledge.

Thus the production of scientific knowledge in France adopted a performative temporal structure and practice of public display before Locke’s philosophy was widely circulated, and before Newtonianism has swept through French natural philosophy.

Sensationism, in turn, consolidated the persuasive power of experiment, since it

“engendered a suspicious attitude toward abstract theory, which operated at a remove from immediate physical sensation.”127 The immediacy of scientific displays offered sentimental audiences access to knowledge that Cartesian ruminations could not deliver without experiment. Public performances of natural effects exposed the private activity of reflective philosophical rationalism. Licoppe continues:

…la démonstration expérimentale publique, pour des érudits dont le monde reste imprégné de la propension à l’ésotérism et au secret, met ostentoirement en scène

126 Mersenne, for example defended his experiments in defense of Galileo in a letter to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc by claiming that they “ont été répétées plus de trente fois et quelques unes plus de cent fois, devant de bons esprits, qui tous ont conclu comme moi, sans en excepter aucun” (have been repeated more than thirty times and some more than one hundred times in front of good minds, all of whom have concluded as I have, without exception). Quoted in Licoppe, 49.

127 Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 10.

88 le déplacement de l’expérience de l’espace privé du laboratoire vers la scène publique de l’assemblée savante.128

(…the public experimental demonstration, for scholars whose world remained full of a propensity for esoterism and secrets, ostentatiously staged the displacement of the experiment from the private space of the laboratory to the public stage of the learned assembly.)

This orientation toward public display entwined with a parallel theatrical notion invoked in late-seventeenth-century natural philosophy: that of the hidden causes of natural phenomena. Experimental philosophy did not just expose the secrets of the laboratory, but also those of nature herself. Fontenelle (1657-1757) described this theatricality of hidden causes in his comparison of nature to the scenographic devices of the opera.129 These two facets of experimental physics together suggest that a compound theatricality intervened between the French Enlightenment mind and the natural world: the rationalist-mechanistic concept of the world as an elaborate uniform machine operated as an ideological support for an emerging experience-driven social and cultural practice of publicly demonstrating experiments.

Because no institutional structure existed to enclose natural philosophy within a network of professional relations, the social phenomenon of experimentation in the seventeenth century was initially porous and mutable.130 The practice of validating scientific observations had originated by necessity at a remove from institutions of political and religious authority. According to Geoffrey V. Sutton, natural philosophy

128 Licoppe, 51.

129 See chapter epigraph. Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (La Tour-d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, 1990), 22-3.

130 Simon Schaffer suggests that the eighteenth century witnessed “the change between an entrepreneurial deployment of natural philosophy and a political control of that natural philosophy.” “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century” History of Science, xxi (1983), 1.

89 remained somewhat at odds with the mid-century literary salon—the elite realm of politesse and honnéteté during the austere ministry of Richelieu—but underwent a rapprochement under Mazarin from 1642-1661 wherein “it was philosophy that was adapted to conform to social norms.”131 The social traffic in natural philosophy thus took on two materially distinguishable but interrelated forms, infiltrating polite society in both literary works and small scale lecture demonstrations.

Fontenelle’s popular Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes exhibits the literary aspect of natural philosophy’s socio-cultural circulation, depicting as it does a conversation between its author—a Cartesian philosopher and nephew of Pierre

Corneille—and a learned woman, the Marquise de G. The philosopher frames his work as a fanciful diversion for those “qui ont des pensées à perdre” (who have thoughts to spare), and in particular for women, who ought to give the book “la même application qu’il faut donner à la Princesse de Clèves” (the same effort that one ought to give the

Princess of Cleves), a popular novel of the previous decade. Physics was thus both aestheticized and sensualized in its literary incarnations. Fontenelle explains that

Comme je n’ai pas prétendu faire un système en l’air, et qui n’eût aucun fondement, j’ai employé de vrais raisonnements de physique, et j’ai employés autant qu’il a été nécessaire. Mais il se trouve heureusement dans ce sujet que les idées de physique y sont riantes d’elles-mêmes, et que, dans le même temps qu’elles contentent la raison, elles donnent à l’imagination un spectacle qui lui plaît autant que s’il était fait exprès pour elle.132

(As I have not presumed to create a system out of air with no foundation, I have used as much true physical reasoning as was necessary. However, it is happily the case that the ideas of physics here are gay in themselves, and that, while they satisfy reason, they also give the imagination a spectacle that pleases it as much as it would had it been made expressly for it.)

131 Geoffrey V. Sutton, Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, & the Demonstration of Enlightenment (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 103.

132 Fontenelle, Entretiens, 13.

90

Rather than a vessel for imparting tedious instruction, Fontenelle’s novel was meant to please a sentimental readership. It was part of a social phenomenon as much as of a literary one. As Sutton has it, “Fontenelle’s excursion into the politesse of science was a product of the milieu of the salons and the philosophical curiosity of its denizens.”133

In contrast to Fontenelle’s literary popular philosophy, Jacques Rohault (1620-

1672) exemplifies the late-seventeenth-century infiltration of elite social life by way of live physics lecture demonstrations. Significantly, his philosophical practice reflects both a methodological swing that forecast the eighteenth-century marginalization of

Cartesianism and a shift toward experimental standards of proof. As R. W. Home puts it,

“along with new ideas about nature’s workings came a change in emphasis” from the general and systematic physica generalis to the physica particularis of specific objects.

Home identifies Rohault as an example of this trend, since in the natural philosopher’s

1671 Traité de Physique, “Cartesian physics was expounded, without the metaphysical underpinnings that Descartes himself had stressed, as an experimental science chiefly distinguished by explanations based on corpuscular mechanisms in a universal ether.”134

This shift from general to particular physics within Cartesianism, insofar as it is representative of a wider intellectual phenomenon, signals a migration toward a

Newtonian subordination of hypotheses to discrete experimental findings. It also conforms to the increasing importance of discrete objects of natural philosophy and the cognitive techniques employed to frame them.

133 Sutton, 146.

134 R. W. Home, “Mechanics and Experimental Physics” in The Cambridge History of Science Vol. 4 (Cambridge UK & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 355.

91 Historians of science identify Rohault as the progenitor of the experimental lecture demonstration in France.135 It is critical to note that Rohault’s experimental practice took on a social function beyond that utilized by scientists who sought just to have their discoveries validated by learned fellows. Rohault’s experiments, performed throughout the 1660s in his home on “Cartesian Wednesdays” were “a way of illustrating a complete and coherently organized course of physics,” and were much in demand.136

Historians differ in characterizing just how public or private these demonstrations were, but concur that the experiments were available outside the University of Paris system,137 and that they involved a measure of histrionic savvy on Rohault’s part:

The main attractions of Rohault’s Wednesdays were his demonstrations; at each meeting, a philosophical object or instrument served as the centerpiece. His cabinet included one of the finest lodestones in Europe, Huygens noted, and it was used to great effect. […] Rohault was a showman and an entertainer: In his laboratory, nature delighted by its surprising behavior. Yet despite Somaize’s impressions, the audience heard no Faustian schemes for perverting natural processes. To be sure they enjoyed the wonders of nature as they might an elaborately staged play, but Rohault always explained his effects and exposed the props and mechanisms that nature used to set his stage.138

An analysis of the theatricality of experimental physics must of course distinguish between the figurative language of historians and attributes of a coherent historical paratheatrical practice. Rohault’s pedagogical innovations, according to Lynn, were that he taught amateurs including women in non-academic settings and provided “physical

135 Ibid., 356.

136 Michael R. Lynn, Popular Science and Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France (Manchester and London: Manchester University Press, 2006), 18; Lawrence Brockliss, “Science, Universities, and other Public Spaces: Teaching Science in Europe and the Americas” in The Cambridge History of Science Vol. 4, 63.

137 Brockliss claims that Rohault made “one of the first breaches in the university monopoly of physics teaching.” Ibid.

138 Sutton, 107.

92 demonstrations rather than mathematical proofs.”139 Sutton’s characterization of

Rohault’s theatrical presentations, however, is not a glibly applied metaphor, and I will argue in my next section that such displays of physics experiments bore specific paratheatrical markings.

Rohault’s “change in emphasis” from the general to the particular in physics was carried on in more academic settings by the medical doctor and exhibitor of physics

Pierre Polinière (1671-1734). Polinière began demonstrating physical principles to embellish university courses in Cartesian physics near the end of the seventeenth century, but quickly developed an independent university course and additional “courses for the general public.”140 His demonstrations were held in such esteem and generated sufficient curiosity that Louis XV attended his course at the Collège d’Harcourt in 1722.141

Historians have credited Polinière with “the first major infiltration of an experimental outlook into the French educational system,” and have argued that his career marked “the beginning of a shift towards empiricism in the classrooms of Paris.”142 However, he did not attain a high level of academic legitimacy as researcher. When the physicist and his

English contemporary Francis Hauksbee simultaneously discovered the tendency of mercury to glow when placed in a vacuum and agitated, Polinière’s presentation of the

139 Lynn, 18.

140 Home, 356-7.

141 Michel Antoine, Louis XV (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 101.

142 Home, 357; Lynn, 18-9.

93 phenomenon to the Académie des sciences could not take place without a special invitation.143

Thus while Polinière has been contrasted with Rohault for having brought experimental physics into the university classroom, his academic standing remained less than that of Fontenelle, who was named “perpetual secretary” of the Royal Academy of

Sciences in 1699.144 Live displays of physical phenomena steadily gained in popularity and legitimacy in the late seventeenth century, but moral wariness of experimentation lingered in France. Fontenelle wrote in his Éloge de Newton that

The art of conducting experiments carried to a certain degree is by no means common. The least part which is offered to our eyes is complicated by so many others which compose or modify it, that one cannot, without great skill, discern everything which is a part of it, nor, even without great sagacity, suspect all that may enter into it. We must break down the fact in question into others which are themselves complex; and sometimes if one has not chosen his path well, he will lose himself in a labyrinth from which he will never emerge. The primitive, elementary facts seem to have been hidden from us by nature with as much care as the causes; and when we come to see them, it is an entirely new and unforseen [sic] spectacle.145

Fontenelle’s mistrust of hasty empirical conclusions was shared by some late into the eighteenth century, as The University of Paris mémoire of 1784 clearly shows.146 At the turn of the century, though, experimental displays popularized natural philosophy; the practice did not heavily impinge on the position occupied by literary and otherwise

143 Sutton, 206. See David W. Corson, “Pierre Polinière, Francis Hauksbee, and Electroluminescence: A Case Study of Simultaneous Discovery” Isis, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Winter, 1968), 402-13.

144 Fontenelle already enjoyed the status of member of the Académie des inscriptions, but Sutton claims that his success as a popularizer helped install him in the Académie des sciences (164).

145 Fontenelle, Éloge de Newton, quoted in and translated by Leonard M. Marsak, Bernard de Fontenelle: The Idea of Science in the French Enlightenment. Printed in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol. 49, No. 7 (1959), 37.

146 By Jonathan Israel’s assessment, Fontenelle “eschewed Newtonianism and Locke’s empiricism, remaining less ‘an unregenerate Cartesian’, as he has been called, than a systematic mechanicist and materialist who opposed Newtonian insistence on the impossibility of our grasping final causes and the dependence of the material world on divine regulation” (517-8).

94 discursive presentations of nature. Sutton has characterized early century literary and experimental forms of knowledge production as “distinct” styles of natural philosophy, but he suggests that the latter supported or embellished the former: “Polinière’s demonstrations lent credence to the system to be learned from the philosophy faculty or the literary expositor.”147 As the eighteenth century progressed, experiments occupied an increasingly central position in physics instruction overall and the literary and experimental strands of physics knowledge intertwined.

Philosophical literature and live demonstrations reinforced each other as socio- cultural trends, but experiments took center stage early in the eighteenth century.

Whereas Fontenelle embodied the features of a literary philosophy—or philosophical literature—founded on diverting thought experiments, Polinière produced a variant literary form in his 1709 Expériences de physique, which offered detailed descriptions and diagrams of his experiments and cabinet. These descriptions, which likely incorporated content given verbally during the public performances of experiments, contained concise explications of Cartesian mechanics. The explanation for Polinière’s first experiment, for example, explicitly cites the principle of gravity or “heaviness”

(pesanteur) outlined in Descartes Principes (1644).148 The experimental form was thus able to appropriate the knowledge laid out in philosophical treatises, while philosophical literature could never similarly capture the live, sensory appeal of experimentation.

Though Polinière’s prose offers little embellishment of his technical explanations, his book was not just intended for experts in physics. Polinière believed it would give

147 Sutton, 204.

148 Pierre Polinière, Expériences de physique (Paris: Jean de Laulne, 1709), 8-10.

95 pleasure “en general à tous ceux qu’aiment la Physique, de donner une description exacte de ces instrumens & des expériences que j’ai coutume de faire”149 (in general to all those who like physics, to give an exact description of these instruments and of the experiments that I am used to performing). This prediction is confirmed by four re- editions of the Expériences that appeared by 1741. Polinière’s book of experiments was conceived both to provide some knowledge of experimental physics to those unable to see the experiments in person, but also to enhance the knowledge of those who did, since

“il arrive souvent qu’on ne comprend pas bien les explications des expériences faute de bien entendre la construction des instrumens dont je me sers, & la maniere d’en faire usage”150 (it frequently happens that one doesn’t understand the explanations of experiments for not understanding the construction of the instruments I use and the manner of using them). Thus the appearance of the book of experiments in philosophical literature witnessed the annexation of a literary form to the experimental enterprise that gathered practitioners.

By the time of the Abbé Nollet, Polinière’s successor as France’s best known scientific popularizer, the experimental form had taken on new trappings of academic legitimacy and cultural currency. Nollet is believed to have met Polinière after becoming part of the Société des Arts in 1728, and, in G.L’E Turner’s estimation, “inherited both an example and an audience” from his predecessor.151 Indeed there are many reasons to portray Nollet as Polinière’s direct heir. Fontenelle, paid respect to both popularizers

149 Ibid, v.

150 Ibid.

151 G.L’E Turner, “Scientific Instruments and their Makers” in The Cambridge History of Science Vol. 4, 514.

96 while perpetual secretary of the Académie des Sciences by sending his own nephew to

Polinière’s class for instruction, and, somewhat more formally, by signing the approbation of Nollet’s 1738 Programme ou Idée générale d’un cours de Physique

Expérimentale.152

Nollet was himself inducted into the Académie des Sciences the following year, attaining a position that eluded Polinière, but the younger physicien adopted several components of his elder’s public profile. When he died in 1734, Polinière had been teaching experimental physics in various Parisian venues since the turn of the century, including courses “in the Collège de Harcourt and in other colleges of the University of

Paris.”153 Like Polinière, Nollet gave his demonstrations both inside and outside of the

University of Paris, explaining natural phenomena to a large and varied public.

Descriptions of Nollet’s experiments and machines were also published in multi-volume sets that saw many re-editions throughout the century. Finally, in 1744 Nollet, like

Polinière had done in 1722, gave his course to the Dauphin.154 By the middle of the century, experimental physics lecture demonstrations had attained a pinnacle, combining sanction from the highest strata of French academic and political life with a broad sensational appeal appreciated by a growing spectatorship.

152 Torlais, 41-2.

153 According to David W. Corson, the “Abrégé de la vie de M. Polinière” that appeared in the 5th edition of his Expériences de physique states that “Polinière had given these courses for more than 30 years prior to his death in 1734. Thus he would have begun them sometime around 1700-1704. However, an associate named Du Tal, in a Sept. 1706 article in the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, stated that Polinière had at that time been giving his lectures for more than ten years, which would place the date closer to 1695.” David W. Corson, ibid., 404.

154 Nollet again surpassed Polinière in that he received an invitation to Versailles for the occasion. Torlais, 54-5; Turner, 514-5.

97 II. Experimental Physics Lecture Demonstrations as Paratheatrical Performance

Though historians have consistently described physics spectacles in overtly theatrical terms, it is another matter to claim that such displays were, in their historicity, manifestly theatrical.155 Applying this term to a social and cultural phenomenon as diverse and unstable as eighteenth-century experimental physics displays raises thorny methodological issues: any study of a popularizer or physics course could not help but miss aspects of the lived experience generated out of experimental practice, and we lack a definition of theatricality whose criteria can be plainly satisfied by available documentary evidence.156 Nonetheless, it is clear that printed means of diffusion ceded emphasis to performed experiments in natural philosophy of the eighteenth century.157 It is not so much necessary, for the purposes of my study, to show that the experiments resembled

155 See for example: Victor Lecot, L’Abbé Nollet de Pimprez (Noyon: Imprimerie de Cottu-Harlay, 1856), 58-9, 62; Sutton, 196, Lynn, 16, 25.

156 Tracy C. Davis’ definition of theatricality, derived from Thomas Carlyle’s work, is worth consideration here. She places theatricality in the public sphere, depicting it as “A spectator’s dédoublement resulting from a sympathetic breach (active dissociation, alienation, self-reflexivity) effecting a critical stance toward an episode in the public sphere, including but not limited to theatre.” Davis treats the term with ambivalence, arguing that it entails both an enabling and estranging subjective function that shores up the social order. “Theatricality and Civil Society,” in Theatricality, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 145, 153-4. Scholars outside of theatre and performance studies have applied narrow definitions of theatricality to various projects. Michael Fried, for example, opposes theatricality to absorption in mid to late eighteenth-century painting. For Fried, the theatrical in painting acknowledges the beholder, while anti-theatrical painting treats “the beholder as if he weren’t there.” It is of note that Fried associates theatrical style with work that is “ingratiating and mediocre.” It must also be said that this “anti-theatrical” depiction of subjects as unaware of being observed in painting is entirely compatible with Diderot’s notion of drame, wherein stage tableaux were meant to replace exaggerated coups de théâtre in part by approaching real life (E 140). See Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 5. Also notable is Samuel Weber’s view that theatricality transcends the terms of artificiality and presence that have historically marked its limits. Weber addresses theatricality “not as a medium of representation, but as a medium that redefines activity as reactivity, and that makes its peace, if ever provisionally, with separation.” Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004) 29. See also Josette Féral ed., Substance 98/99 (Vol. 31, Nos 2 & 3, 2002).

157 Lynn claims that experimental physics “monopolized the French popular consciousness during the Enlightenment through a mixture of good timing and spectacular presentations.” Lynn, 10.

98 theatre in a general sense, as it is to convey how the eighteenth-century French spectator applied spatial techniques and practices from one venue to the other.

In order to best serve the demands of my overall thesis, I will pursue several lines of argument relating experimental physics to theatrical representation. First, I contend that experimental physics lecture demonstrations shared a common audience with theatre, and thus the two social practices together cultivated a spectator habituated to spatial arrangements, temporal structures and social protocols common to experimental and theatrical domains. Empirical evidence suggests that the spectatorship of experiments and theatre overlapped, but my analysis is not primarily concerned with the social dynamics of audiences. Rather, by tracing the spatial contours of experimental practice, I hope to evoke points of commonality in the way theatrical amusements and experimental physics were staged. The manifold of spatial experience (socially) produced in tandem by both architecture and spectatorial techniques (attention, observation and cognition) drew theatre spectators into a mutually-reinforcing relationship with the subject that positioned and mediated natural phenomena.158 These commonalities in turn reflect a formal homology that obtains between the representational structures of public physics experiments and of Enlightened French dramaturgy: each purported to represent the truth of nature, though each on its own terms. Experimental physics of this era was not theatre—it did not incorporate theatre’s incumbent separation from reality—but it harbored a representational structure that placed it in a mediate relationship with the truth

158 Cassirer affirms that representationalism haunted the psychology of Locke and Condillac. See The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 18. My claim may therefore be evaluated both on the level of the history of philosophy, which in the modern era deems epistemology to be first philosophy, and thus makes a project out of describing and accounting for consciousness, or on the level of a material history of mentalities.

99 of nature. Thus my second argumentative strategy is to characterize these experimental physics lecture demonstrations as a paratheatrical representation of the natural world.

Paratheatre is identified in theatre history with a stage in the career of Jerzy

Grotowski, wherein his research group rejected the actor-performer binary of theatre, and instead pursued experiments that “included all members of the Laboratory Institute but also vast numbers of individuals from outside the group.” According to Grotowski, paratheatrical events “were not to be considered actor training, […] or necessarily as art per se,” but as “a means of allowing creative individuals the possibility of meeting and functioning together.”159 Paratheatre in this sense collapses the barrier between spectator and participant, and consequently refuses to mark the object of its performance as fictive.

Bruce Wilshire has observed conversely that “[t]he paratheatrical breaches [the] seal between the playing area and the outside world in unexpected ways,” expressing concern about the ethical consequences of “attempting to apply categories of fiction to the domain of fact.”160 Displays of experimental physics indeed troubled the “seal” that formally distinguished the objects of theatrical representation from the world at large, but retained highly theatrical protocols. Theatre’s architectural brokering of spatial presence and audio-visual access, its isolation of discrete objective domains, and its temporal structures of preparation, execution and repetition all describe the fully developed “art expérimental” of mid-century France.161

159 Robert Findlay and Halina Filipowicz, “Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre,” The Dramatic Review, Vol. 30, No. 3, (Autumn, 1986), 204.

160 Bruce Wilshire, “The Concept of the Paratheatrial,” The Dramatic Review, Vol. 34, No. 4. (Winter, 1990), 169-70.

161 This coinage was used by Diderot in 1754. See Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature, in Œuvres Complètes de Diderot, v. IX (Paris: Herrman, 1981), 27.

100 Finally, in order to concisely describe the spatial signatures of this paratheatrical media, I focus primarily on the physics experiments of one exemplary figure, the Abbé

Nollet, who was both part of the French academic establishment and a famous popularizer. Nollet’s experiments are thus uniquely germane to the theatricality of knowledge production in eighteenth-century France. Lynn notes that “Nollet engaged in a certain amount of entertainment, but he also worked on knowledge production.”162

While the distinction between these two terms is a dubious one, Nollet’s reputation as an expert in electricity, his access to the elite realm of French social life, and his erudition set him apart from his peers. The Abbé’s status well surpassed that of the “middling savants” whose physics displays are easier to align with popular entertainment. His work embodied the theatrical mode of representing natural phenomena that emerged in French

Enlightenment culture and prompted awkward institutional efforts to absorb and discipline experimental practice. From 1753 to 1794, when it was subsumed by the École

Polytechnique, 163 the Collège de Navarre supported a robust instructional performance tradition that served multiple social strata, even as it sat in an interstitial position among

French academic institutions.164

162 Ibid., 2.

163 The Collège de Navarre was subsumed into the École Polytechnique in 1794 according to L’encyclopédie d’architecture, M.A. de Baudot and MM.H Chaine et P. Gout editors (Paris: Librairies- Imprimeries Réunies, 1891-92. However, in Les Collèges Français, 16e-18e Siècles, we are told that “le collège accueille en 1805 l’école polytechnique” (289).

164 Breteuil’s 1784 project was the second such attempt to attach the Chair to the Académie des Sciences. Despite the University’s successful opposition to these initiatives, the Chair was not entirely beholden to the University: its occupant was not required to undergo the agrégation, or professorial formal qualifying exams, and the professor was, after all tasked with providing his own instruments. Les Collèges Français, 16e-18e Siècles, 288. The “Deliberations” of the Collège de Navarre administration indicate that Nollet was obligated to supply “tous les instruments necessaires pour le cours de physique.” See AN MM 469, 254.

101 a. The Spectatorship of Experimental Physics

Lynn’s study of popular science gives one a sense of the magnitude and composition of experimental physics as a social phenomenon:

In the period from 1735 to 1793 more than seventy individuals offered a variety of courses and demonstrations just in experimental physics. […] The practice of scientific popularization rose throughout the century, reaching its highest levels during the period from about 1775 up to the first years of the French Revolution. During that period an average of fifteen experimental physicists offered more than forty courses in Paris each year. Since each class could have as many as a hundred auditors, and some of the larger classes had as many as four or five hundred, it can be estimated that in any given year several thousand people attended these public lectures.165

Though a dearth of documentary evidence remains to help profile experimental physics audiences, certain facts help form a rough sketch. The notion that experimental physics constituted “theatre of the upper class” is borne out somewhat by a cursory examination of ticket prices. The price of the physics course offered by Brisson, for example, was seventy-two livres for thirty-six lessons. Based on Lagrave’s estimates of the annual incomes of French laborers in the middle of the century, this subscription price would amount to slightly less than one third of the yearly income of a mason or carpenter.166

The price of a particular single two-hour lecture, two livres, would amount to three days of real earnings (gain réel) for such a worker, which leads Lynn to conclude that the prices “precluded any but the fairly wealthy from attending.”167 Two livres was also the price of a middling seat in the third loges of the Comédie-Française, compared to a single

165 Lynn, 19-20.

166 Lagrave estimates that a mason working between 1750 and 1775 earned 9/10 of a livre per day, of which only two thirds could be counted as real earnings. Henri Lagrave, Le Théâtre et le Public à Paris de 1715 à 1750 (Paris: Librairie C. Klincksiek, 1972), 253.

167 Lynn, 53.

102 livre for parterre admission or six livres for a seat on stage or in the first ring of loges.168

The costs endured by attendees of the major Parisian theatres and reputable physics displays were, then, comparable with each other and comfortable only for those of some means.

In order to generate a rough idea of how the spectatorship of experimental physics compared to the theatre-going public, one can look at estimates of theatre attendance in the middle of the century. Voltaire, who paid close attention to Paris theatre audiences but used no apparent methodology in estimating their size, believed in 1733 that a core of no more than 4000 “hommes” went to the theatre assiduously, but that a wider audience of some 30,000 “jugent des ouvrages dramatiques, et […] jugent presque tous les jours”169 (judge dramatic works, and judge nearly every day). Voltaire’s estimates were likely weighted toward the spectatorship of the Comédie-Française, which could hold around 1200 individuals, and which Le Kain the actor claimed in 1768 that “4,000 personnes environ […] fréquentent habituellement”170 (around 4000 persons habitually frequented). If as Lynn has claimed, several thousand people also attended physics lecture demonstrations in Paris between 1775 and 1789, and if the pricing schemes of the two sorts of diversion fell within a similar range, it is plausible that many were spectators of both.

168 H. Carrington Lancaster, The Comédie-Française 1701-1774. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol., 41. Part 4 (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1951), 595.

169 Quoted in Lagrave, 173-4. See also De Rougement, 222.

170 Charles De Wailly, “Mémoire sur le Projet d’une Salle à construire pour la Comédie-Française,” BNF MNS. NAF 2479/416.

103 Of course, these facts do not alone imply that the publiques of experimental physics and of the major Parisian theatres overlapped significantly. There are other signs that the major theatres and popularizers partook of the same well-heeled audience. For example, Élie Catherine Fréron comments in a February of 1750 review of the cabinet of

Charles Rabiqueau that

[c]omme les Spectacles vont être fermés pendant trois semaines, on peut par dédommagement se procurer le plaisir de voir ces curiosités physiques. L’Auteur fait aussi les Expériences de l’Electricité. On trouve encore chez lui un assortiment de tout ce qui concerne ce qu’on appelle vulgairement la Physique Occulte ; c’est-à-dire, les tours de Gibeciere, qui ne sont autre chose en général que les Récréations Mathématiques d’Ozanam.171

([s]ince the theatres will be closed for three weeks, one may compensate with the pleasure of seeing these curiosities of physics. The author [of them] also performs electrical experiments. One also finds at his place an assortment of things that concern what one coarsely deems occult physics, which is to say, the turns of Gibeciere [prestidigitation], which are generally nothing more than the mathematical amusements of Ozanam.)

Rabiqueau’s optical and electrical spectacles were evidently spurned by the academic establishment, and were aligned by Fréron with theatrical amusements like acts of prestidigitation.

This is not the only contemporaneous observation that links the spectatorships of physics and of theatre. Francesco Algarotti, himself a literary popularizer of Newtonian physics and the author of a treatise on the opera, claimed that women attended Nollet’s cabinet “to watch him refract light the way they go see the staging of Voltaire’s La

Zäire.”172 Such a claim suggests that the social practice of spectatorship itself similarly isolated the objects of experiments and of theatre, but it may also suggest that Algarotti witnessed a transposable subjective viewpoint—what Mercier called an “optique du

171 Élie Catherine Fréron, Lettres sur quelques écrits de ce temps, Tome 3, (1750), 144.

172 Quoted in Lynn, 46-7.

104 théâtre”—that operated between the two species of performance. Both theatre spectatorship and the consumption of scientific spectacle grew over the course of the eighteenth century, serving the demands of an audience that “purchased access to knowledge as well as entertainment.”173 In order to bring into focus the practices spectators adopted in scientific and theatrical spaces, however, I will now turn to the architecture that helped form these practices.

b. The Space of Experimental Physics Instruction

The history of space is critical to my analysis of the theatricality at the heart of eighteenth-century knowledge production. Foucault’s exhortation to write “a whole history” of spaces was grounded in a conviction that architecture, whether in unrealized plans, demolished structures or in presently existing spatial assemblies, reveals the combined operations of power and knowledge “from the great strategies of geo-politics to the little tactics of the habitat, institutional architecture from the classroom to the design of hospitals, passing via economic and political installations.”174 Foucault’s insight highlights the need to examine both the institutional use of architecture and the impact of architecture on bodies in wide and narrow focus. Henri Lefebvre, on the other hand, cautions that space must be primarily considered as a social product molded by history and subject to various types of interventions, but which is not the exclusive domain of

173 Ibid., 7.

174 Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 149.

105 condensed discursive and political power.175 Both of these thinkers, however, acknowledge that a dynamic relationship exists between space and knowledge in the modern era. The space of experimental physics, insofar as it can be described by historiography, therefore evokes not only the outlines of the social commerce that transmitted scientific knowledge, but also reveals something about the conditions of knowledge of the natural world.

Bygone historical spaces cannot be fully reconstructed; their lived qualities can only be adumbrated through architectural plans and images, contemporaneous descriptions, and a philosophically grounded abstract representations of space. But the artifacts that give one access to the space of experimental physics prove that that space was—by any considered use of the term—theatrical. In a mundane sense, we know this because experimental performance space was practically transposable into theatre buildings. Lynn confirms that “[m]any popularizers performed scientific demonstrations and offered courses in theatres, particularly those found on the Boulevard du Temple.”176

The Théâtre de Nicolet (also known as the Théâtre de la Gaîté) doubled as a physics school in 1783; thus the contours of one experimental theatre remain in a Parisian archive. Alexis Donnet’s Architectonographie des Théâtres contains plan, elevation and interior perspective drawings of this grand boulevard theatre after its 1806 renovation

(fig. 2.1, 2.2). The space produced by experiments and the “’heroic’ performers” who executed them,177 was accomodated by theatre buildings, but this fact alone does not

175 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 3-4, 59-65.

176 Lynn, 33.

177 Schaffer, 2.

106 provide a sense of the variety of spaces that experimental lectures could occupy. This space was produced by spectatorial practices that were openly spoken of in theatrical terms, as I pointed out in the preceding section, but which could also be applied outside theatre buildings.

Illustrations depicting experimental demonstrations performed for the public in the eighteenth century suggest that experiments were performed in a wide variety of indoor and outdoor spaces. Nollet, for example, demonstrated natural effects in academic, private and public venues.178 Some experiments called for outdoor performances, like the transmission of an electric charge along a quarter mile cord, which

Nollet is said to have done in the garden of his mentor, the prominent electrical researcher C. F. de Cisternay DuFay.179 Drawings in pierre noire by the illustrator

Gabriel de Saint Aubin depict diverse spaces of experimental performance between 1760 and 1780. His 1779 set of etchings of a chemistry course in a large salon in Antoine’s

Mint (Hôtel de la Monnaie), Saint Aubin distributes an audience in an loose band around a large rectangular table, and shows them in relaxed attention as a lecturer stands amidsts scattered jars, glass balls and other devices (fig. 2.3).180 In one of these drawings, broad bands of light stream diagonally through large panel windows and suffuse the center of the room. Saint-Aubin’s 1774 aquarelle drawing of “Louis XVI posant la première pierre de l’amphitheatre des Écoles de Chirurgie” is similarly presented as a space of quite

178 Sutton, 228-9.

179 Torlais, 24.

180 In “Le cours du chimiste Sage à la Monnaie,” the barely visible lecturer is likely Georges-Louis Le Sage (1724-1803), a renowned physicist. See Émile Dacier, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin: Peintre, Dessinateur et Graveur (1724-1780). Tome 2 (Paris and Brussels: G. Van Oest, 1929) 70, pl. XIV; Wend von Kalnein, Architecture in France in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 161.

107 sensate enlightenment: illuminating bands of light fill the room from a pair of tall, open doors and a cupola, streaming down across the space from the upper right of the composition (fig. 2.4).181

These images, rendered by Saint-Aubin with typical informality and candor, cannot directly convey the lived spectatorial practice that animated experimental spaces, but may capture traces of their socio-spatial order. A central focal zone populated by a single lecturer and his machines organizes a partially-enveloping mass of spectators— some standing, some recumbent—who gaze upon and discuss the present spectacle. This arrangement of bodies around a beaker, vacuum chamber or Leyden jar brings to mind the naturally-forming crescent of spectators that the theatre architect Charles de Wailly described in a 1768 manuscript on theatre architecture.182 Such a formation is similarly traced in Saint-Aubin’s drawing of a charlatan, peddling dubious remedies near the Pont

Neuf astride his carriage, (fig. 2.5). Though this image does not refer to the experimental sciences, it does capture the heterogeneity of the boulevard or fairground in “Scène publique,” where physical, mechanical and chemical amusements were also common.

The theatrics of medical charlatans and popularizers of physics created alluring public spaces haunted by threats of deception and false seeming. Saint-Aubin’s inscription casts a critical spectatorial eye:

Ce charlatan Sur la Scène publique Joüant les médicins, Se croit au-dessus d’eux. Le Médicin méprise l’empyrique

181 Dacier, ibid., 80, t. 2 pl. XVII.

182 Charles de Wailly described the origins of theatre auditorium shapes: “d’abord un demicircle se forme devant l’orateur qui est alors à peu près le centre de tous les rayons [visuels]; si les rayons se prolongeant, les nouveaux Spectateurs gagnent sur les côtés de l’orateur en augmentant la Circonference.” BNF MNS. NAF 2479/439.

108 Et le Sage à bon droit Se rit de tous les deux. 183

(This charlatan on the public stage Plays the doctors and puts on airs. The doctor despises the scam and trade And rightly the sage laughs at the pair.)

Saint-Aubin likely penned these words in 1760, when empyrique could refer to a doctor’s practically-acquired craft, but could also describe a medical charlatan, or one giving remedies that had no basis in principles or reasoning. In sketching the bawdy space of the boulevard, the artist’s verses echo Rousseau’s antitheatrical skepticism of experimental spectacle, tinting the histrionic mien of Saint-Aubin’s charlatan in a foreboding light.

The spectators in Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s Le Charlatan are framed in a paratheatrical space wherein the performance of an itinerant purveyor of remedies is critically isolated by the skeptical gaze of the artist. Engraved images of Nollet’s acclaimed experiments, however, manifest another paratheatical marking: an illusory boundary between performer and observer. In 1746 Nollet famously passed an electric pulse through a chain of 140 of Louis’ royal guards holding hands, and later through some 200 Carthusian monks, making them jump.184 An engraving of another electrical demonstration shows how Nollet incorporated members of his more intimate, familial audiences into his experiments. The frontispiece of his Essai sur l’électricité des corps shows a small group arranged around a boy who, suspended by ropes, has been charged with static electricity and prepares to receive a shock on the nose from a seated girl (fig.

2.6). Such involvement of spectators can be read as more than a ploy to hold attention,

183 Dacier, ibid., 102, t. 1, pl. XIV.

184 Lynn, 1.

109 since muscular spasms and jolts made the elusive phenomenon delightfully visible.

Spectators were instantly transformed into the electrically-charged automata imagined in vitalist theories of acting.

The engraving of Nollet’s “electric kiss” and other images published with his experimental accounts also adopt the loosely-formed crescent of observers envisioned by

Saint-Aubin. In the frontispiece to his Leçons de Physique, Nollet stands at a table in what appears to be his personal cabinet while seven attentive men and women observe him (fig. 2.7).185 The Abbé represented in these images and in historical accounts operated within a remarkable range of performance spaces and merged spectacular displays with rigorous procedural specificity and authoritative explanations. The quasi- domestic cabinet de physique, whether Nollet’s own or that which he oversaw for Louis, is the architecture most consistently identified with the Abbé’s historical personae. A portrait by Lajoue of Nollet in the Musée Carnavalet shows him in the King’s cabinet in the village of Passy, surrounded by instruments.186 Another albeit elusive architectural space identified with the Abbé, however, is potentially more indicative of the spatial properties of experiment.

When Nollet gave an address on May 15, 1753 inaugurating the course of experimental physics at the Collège de Navarre, the event was widely reported. The

Gazette d’Amsterdam and the Mercure de France both noted that the Chambre des

Comptes, which audited the Collège, was invited to attend and received auspiciously.187

185 Jean-Antoine Nollet, Leçons de physique expérimentale, sixth edition (Paris: H.-L. Guerin, 1764).

186 “L’Abbé Nollet, Maitre de Physique des Enfants de France.” BHVP 705951.

187 Gazette d’Amsterdam, May 25, 1753; Mercure de France, June 1753.

110 Fréron saw Nollet’s discourse as an occasion to announce the triumph of empirical method in physics:

Ce ne sont plus des systèmes chimériques, édifices ruineux bâtis par l’imagination, détruits par la réfléxion, vains fantômes que l’ignorance faisoit naître & évanouir tour-à-tour. La Philosophie a cessé enfin d’être aveuglément soumise à l’empire de l’opinion. Les simples conjectures ne sont plus de preuves solides ; on veut comprendre & voir pour être convaincu ; on ne se fie qu’à l’expérience, & son témoignage est le guide de tous le Physiciens modernes.188

(These are no longer chimerical systems, ruinous edifices built by the imagination, destroyed by reflection, useless phantoms made to appear and fade in turn by ignorance. Philosophy has finally ceased to be blindly submitted to the domain of opinion. Simple conjectures are no longer solid proofs. One wants to understand and to see in order to be convinced. One trusts only in experience/experiment, and its testimony is the guide of all modern physicists.)

Nollet’s address was by all accounts well received, and Torlais asserts that some 600 persons attended.189 The space in which the Collège de Navarre physics course took place is of special interest, since it became Paris’ most renowned physics space, and the architectural vessel of a defining moment in the legitimization of experimental demonstrations.190

Torlais and others have claimed that Nollet presented his Oratio in an amphitheatre specially built for the new physics course.191 This claim might lead one to believe that this structure was conceived and built for physics instruction, thus allowing for comparative analysis with designs produced in theatre architecture reform movement.

However, the administrative deliberations of the Collège de Navarre do not confirm that

188 Fréron, Lettres sur quelques écrits de ce tems, Tome 11, (1753), 231.

189 Torlais, 188.

190 The Collège de Navarre physics course attracted visitors from diverse locales through the end of the century. See Les Collèges Français, 289.

191 Torlais, 191; René Taton, Histoire de la pensée XI: Enseignement et diffusion des sciences en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hermann, 1964), 627-8.

111 the amphitheatre was originally conceived as a space for experiments. Whereas entries in the Delibérations indicate that 1) in 1753 the college was ordered to build an amphitheatre to accommodate the “grand concours d’auditeurs” (great crowd of auditors) that came to see Nollet, 2) by the end of that year an amphitheatre and “salle pour les machines” (hall for the machines) had been approved, and 3) thereafter the College incurred sporadic expenses to maintain a “grande salle de physique” (great hall of physics), no evidence implies that an independent structure was created especially for the course.192

Instead, the large new building recently completed on campus, in which a “grande salle” had been designed to hold assemblies, was likely modified to suit the physics course.193 After the death in January 1752 of François Vray, the principal of the artiens

(one of the college’s two bodies of students) several major reforms ensued at the Collège de Navarre, including a merger of the artiens and grammairiens under one principal, and the creation of the experimental physics chair. An entry in the Delibérations dated May of 1752 records the college’s various plans for its new building, which included the realization of “la grande salle de six croisées de face pour y soutenir les actes” (the large hall of six thresholds from the front for holding proceedings).194 Louis is thought to have taken advantage of the budget surplus resulting from the abolishment of Vray’s position, issuing a lettre patente ordering the creation of a chair of experimental physics in July of that year. 195 Only in January of 1753, after Louis’ lettre patente was registered with the

192 “Collège de Navarre Delibérations 1709-1774,” AN MM 469, 252-4, 261.

193 This building was designed by Jacques V Gabriel (1667-1742) and executed by Pierre Lebègue and Jérome Beausire, but construction continued into the 1750s. See Collèges de Paris 16e-18e Siècles, 287. 194 AN MM 469, 245.

195 Les Collèges Français, 287; Sorbonne Archive, Carton 15.

112 Parliament, does word of the new experimental physics chair appear in the Delibérations.

What’s more, though Nollet was apparently named to the chair on March 19 of 1753, the command to build an amphitheatre was not recorded until June of 1753. Here, as if to conceal the source of the mandate, the Delibérations convey only that “Vu le grand concours d’auditeurs aux leçons de Mr. L’Abbé Nollet, Mr. Le Proviseur a été chargé de faire faire un plan d’amphithéâtre par Mr. Lebesgue architecte […]”196 (Given the great mass of auditors at the Abbé Nollet’s lessons, the Proviseur has been charged with having an amphitheatre plan made by Mr. Lebesgue the architect). This implies that Nollet’s course preceded the construction of the amphitheatre, and was thus initially held in a space that existed at the College before June of 1753.

Several months later, the Delibérations report the decision to place the physics course in the “grande salle”:

Après plusieurs conférences et examens des plans presentés par Mr. LeBesgue, a été arresté que l’amphithéâtre seroit construit dans la grande salle du bâtiment neuf de la façon qu’il l’est actuellement: en outre a été ordonné qu’une salle seriot disposée, ou elle pourroit être plus commodement pour recevoir les machines servant aux experiences de physique […].197

(After several conferences and examinations of plans presented by Mr. LeBesgue, it has been decided that the amphitheatre will be constructed in the grand hall of the new building in the way that it is now. Also it has been ordered that a hall will be arranged, where it would be most convenient to receive the machines serving the physics experiments […].)

The placement of the physics course in the grande salle is confirmed by an undated

“Mémoire pour Le Collège de Navarre” in the Archives Nationales that mentions expenses incurred by the college related to the grand bâtiment, including those

196 AN MM 469, 251-3.

197 Ibid., 253.

113 …pour y construire le cabinet pour les machines de physique donnée par Le Roy, et la grande classe avec un amphîthéâtre et des tribunes pour placer les foules d’auditeurs, françois et etranges, de tout âge et état, qui continuent d’accourir aux Leçons de Physique Experimentale.198

(…for constructing there the cabinet for the physics machines given by The King, and the grand class with an amphitheatre and platforms for placing the crowd of auditors, French and foreign, of every age and condition, that continue to gather at the Lessons of Experimental Physics.)

Whether or not Nollet began his courses in the grande salle already destined to be finished in the new building in May of 1752, one can be reasonably sure that he soon occupied an amphitheatre built into that very space.

Though no known architectural drawings of this space exist, one can surmise its rough dimensions and a few details from available documents. Assuming both that the amphitheatre was built into a room “de six croisées de face” (six windows of the face) in length, and that its width extended across the whole building, it would have had to fall within an area of roughly 54 by 67 feet (16.5 by 20.5 meters), judging by an architectural drawing of the “grand bâtiment” in the École Polytechnique archive (fig. 2.8). Given that

1) the pit of D’Orbay’s Comédie-Français, which measured roughly 27 by 31 feet, could hold 500, and 2) the “grande salle de physique” was reported to hold a maximum capacity of between 442 and 700 auditors including those standing in the elevated tribunes, it is possible that the room occupied just a portion of the building’s interior width. The University of Paris Mémoire refuting Breteuil in 1784 gives some indications of the space’s interior disposition:

Il y a dans cette salle sept rangs de gradins qui ont ensemble 486 pieds courants. À 18 pouces par personne, ce qui est la mesure ordinaire, il y tiendrait 338 auditeurs. Si on veut les serrer beaucoup et ne leur donner que 16 pouces, il en tiendra 376. Les tribunes ont ensemble 44 pieds de front. Supposer y deux rangs

198 “Mémoire pour Le College de Navarre,” AN S 6546. The handwriting and paper of this document resemble those of another memorandum in the carton dated February, 1783.

114 (un troisième rang ne pouroit rien voir) ce seroit encore à 16 pouces = 66 personnes: en tout 442.199

(There are within this hall seven tiered rows, which together are 486 pieds (530 feet) end to end. At 18 pouces (19.62 inches) per person, which is the ordinary measure, it will hold 338 auditors. If one wants to take in more and give them only 16 pouces (17.44 inches), it will hold 376. The platforms together are 44 pieds (47.96 feet) on face. Supposing two rows there (a third row would be able to see nothing) this would be at 16 pouces = 66 persons: all in all 442.)

Nollet’s grande salle de physique, like other notable works of academic architecture, adopted several tiered rows of seats. Like a theatre, however, it also had an elevated row for added capacity.

These parameters give only a rough indication of how the hall was laid out, but the theatrical quality of that space depends neither solely on its dimensions nor on the arrangement of spectators within it. The ideological freight of mid-eighteenth century experimental physics also filled it with expectations of edifying spectacles of natural effets. Nollet’s widely reported inaugural address spoke of the space that Louis had opened up for experimental physics: “today the doors of the Royal Collège are opened up to those curious about matters of physics; a new theatre for experiments is open whence natural laws, and phenomena, will be explained for so many years.”200 This quite public theatre was the site of an ongoing performance of nature’s material properties that was sustained for at least four decades.

Thus the theatricality of the space generated by the experimental component of natural philosophy was not site-dependent. Nollet displayed his wares in gardens, private salons, and customized amphitheatres. The architectural remainders of these spaces

199 Sorbonne Archive, Carton 16, no. 61.

200 “Hodiè physicarum rerum Curiousis panduntur Regiæ Navarre fores; novum aperitur Experimentis Theatrum unde quotannis nature leges explicentur, & phenomena.” Jean-Antoine Nollet, “Oratio habita a Joanne-Antonio Nollet” BNF bound volume, 40Z Le Senne 2727 (10), 4-5. Translated by Eric Parks.

115 suggest that both spectatorial practices—navigation of urban networks, purchasing of admission, interaction with other spectators—and techniques—aural and visual focus, sustained attention, selective inattention—could have easily been transferred between theatrical amusements and physics lessons, and could in fact operate in a wide range of urban sites. Theatres were used by physics popularizers for the same reason that the

“grande salle” of the Collège de Navarre was assigned to Nollet’s course: high quality experimental spectacles attracted great crowds. The architectural remains of these spaces of natural philosophy thus reveal another aspect of the performances they housed, but they can only gesture at what was theatrical about those performances. In my final section I will argue that the theatricality of experimental physics in eighteenth-century

France was as much a manifestation of aesthetic qualities deeply ingrained in the

Enlightenment concept of nature as it was the result of a spectatorial or architectural use of space.

c. Experience and the Theatricality of Knowledge Production

The fact that Nollet dubbed the Collège de Navarre course of experimental physics a “theatre for experiments” (experimentis theatrum) is only one of several signs that a theatrical mode of representation operated in this area of natural philosophy. This theatricality is expressed in the craft of performing experiments for crowds, but issues in part from an underlying aesthetic believed to structure the experience of nature. Nollet, in his 1753 inaugural address, chose to address “les différentes parties d’un physicien qui s’applique à l’art des expériences”201 (the different parts of a physicist who applies

201 Nollet, Oratio, 8.

116 himself to the art of experiments). The Abbé emphasized the experimental philosopher’s need for a solid grounding in natural history but differentiated these two pursuits by their divergent objectives. Whereas natural history aims to provide “l’inventaire de nos richesses” (the inventory of our riches), experimental physics “entreprend de nous dévoiler le méchanisme de la nature” (sets out to unveil the mechanism of nature).202

The latter characterization strongly echoes Fontenelle’s comparison of nature to an operatic spectacle whose machines are well concealed. Diderot also speaks of the experimental art (l’art experimental) in his 1754 Pensées sur l’interpretation de la nature, in which he claims that experimentation, along with observation and reflection compose the three ways the human mind can approach nature: “L’observation recueille les faits, la réflexion les combine, l’expérience vérifie le résultat”203 (Observation collects the facts, reflection combines them, experiment verfies the result).

For Nollet, however, the qualities that describe a good experimental physicist— patience, attentiveness, penetrating intellect, wise and moderate imagination—are enhanced by certain communicative skills that aid in teaching physics to others. Physics lessons are to be delivered out loud (vive voix), which gives them an advantage over books. What is more, the instructor is to comport himself like a good orator, with attention to “les expressions les plus propres; il les répéte & les varie, jusqu’à ce qu’il ait lieu de croire qu’il a été éntendu: le ton, le geste, un coup de crayon” (the most proper expressions; he repeats and varies them until it happens that he believes he’s been

202 Ibid., 9.

203 Diderot, Pensées, 39.

117 understood: tone, gesture, a mark with the pencil).204 Such is the nature of experiment, according to Nollet, that it profits from the pedagogical gifts of the senses. In other words, he reproduces arguments commonly employed by eighteenth-century intellectuals to defend the utility of theatre. Nollet’s mention of tone and gesture recalls Charles

Porée’s analysis in his 1733 Discours sur les Spectacles:

Si des exemples attachés à des Lettres mortes, confiés à des Dépositaires inanimés, ont toutefois une sorte d’âme, un reste de leur antique chaleur ; quelle sera leur force & leur vie lorsqu’ils renaîtront dans l’action, qu’ils seront vivifiés par le feu du mouvement, qu’ils parleront eux-mêmes au cœur, à l’oreille, à l’œil, avec toute la grandeur des sentimens, avec tous les charmes de la voix, avec toute l'éloquence du geste! Telle est l’innocente magie que se propose la Scéne.205

(If examples attached to dead letters, entrusted to inanimate holders, still have a sort of soul, a vestige of their ancient warmth, then what force and life will they have when they are reborn in action, when they are vivified by the fire of movement, when they themselves speak to the heart, to the ear, to the eye, with all the grandeur of their sentiments, with all the charms of the voice, with all the eloquence of the gesture! Such is the innocent magic the stage puts forth.)

The innocent magic of the stage was compatible with the innocent magic of experimental philosophy because both made their appeals to the mind through the material conduit of the senses—especially vision. Nollet goes so far as to cite Horace’s endorsement of staged theatrical action over mere readings of plays as an argument in favor of experimental demonstrations. The Abbé in 1753 spoke to his peers about the ability of a well-stocked experimental cabinet to “[mettre] sous les yeux presque toutes les vérités qu’on se propose de vous faire entrer dans l’esprit” (put before the eyes nearly every truth one wants to make enter the mind). The greater ability of visual displays to hold attention prompts Nollet’s citation of the Ars Poetica:

204 Nollet, Oratio, 13.

205 P. Charles Porée, Discours sur les spectacles, translated from Latin by P. Brumoy (Paris: Jean-Baptiste Coignard fils, 1733), 21.

118

Les idées peuvent-elles manquer de naître & de se perfectionner à la vûe de ces images sensibles; soyez sûr que ce vouz verrez ainsi, avec intérêt, avec attention, fera plus d’impression sur vous, que tous les discours qui auront précédé, & que ce dernier moyen ne manquera pas de dissiper vos doutes, & d’affermir vos connaissances. Segnius irritant animos demissa paer aurem Quam quæ sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus….206

(Can the ideas fail to be born and to be perfected in view of these sensible images? Be sure that what you see in this way, with interest, with attention, will make a greater impression on you than all of the discourses that have come before, and that this last means will not fail to dissipate your doubts, and to strengthen your understanding. Generally speaking the mind is more excited By what it actually sees with its own eyes Than by what comes in through the avenue of the ears.)207

The citation of Horace’s maxim indicates Nollet’s commitment to the aesthetic components of his trade, and the profound epistemic sympathy sustained between proponents of theatre and of experimental physicists. Experimental physics’ appeal to the primacy of sense-knowledge worked in tandem with the shift in dramatic theory outlined in my previous chapter to promote a notion of spectatorship founded overwhelmingly on the function of sensation.

One should not prematurely assume that arguments common to defenses of theatre and experimentation reflect only a superficial link between the two types of performance, or that performativity amounts to an ancillary function of experimental science. Historians of science have long invoked spectatorial practices to analyse eighteenth-century knowledge production. Simon Schaffer, for example, argues that in this period “experimental natural philosophy can be analysed in terms of a practice of

206 Nollet, Oratio, 13.

207 Here I have added David Ferry’s translation of the lines Nollet quotes from Horace’s Ars Poetica. David Ferry, The Epistles of Horace (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 165.

119 public display, and its rhetoric interpreted as a set of claims about the putative effect on an audience of the experience of the production of active powers from matter.”208

Christian Licoppe, furthermore, finds in Nollet’s experimental descriptions marks of theatrical use of space and rehearsal:

Les récits expérimentaux de l’Abbé Nollet s’organisent suivant la séquence maintenant familière préparation/effet/explication, à la première personne du singulier et au passé, simple ou composé. Mais le caractère visuel et spectaculaire de l’effet y est systématiquement mis en scène à travers l’emploi, insistant jusqu’à la répétition, de la forme narrative « Je fis…Je vis…».209

(The accounts of Abbé Nollet’s experiments are organized according to a now familiar sequence of preparation/effect/explanation in the first person singular present or past, simple or compound tenses. But the effect’s visual and spectacular character is systematically staged by the use, insistent to the point of a repetition, of the narrative form “I did…I saw…”)

Nonetheless, some historians, including Michael Lynn, have implicitly sorted displays of natural phenomena across a spectrum reaching from legitimate scientific investigations to dubious, profit-seeking charlatanerie. It should be clear, however, that no bright line can be retroactively drawn to separate these two types of performances.210 Nor ought one to presume that the more specious displays were also the more theatrical. The case of

Nollet makes clear that theatricality was not just a mode of address employed by lesser, middling savants.

Instead, it expressed an aesthetic element integral to the experimental generation of knowledge itself. In Simon Schaffer’s words, the physics lecture was “an ‘ideal type’ for the production of natural philosophy,” but the particulars of lecture demonstrations were not an inert means of distribution for autonomously produced knowledge, since “the

208 Simon Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle,” 1.

209 Licoppe, 163-4.

210 See, for example, Stevin Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

120 audience-relation is important for understanding the natural philosophical project.”

Schaffer contends, furthermore, that the importance of the spectatorial function is linked to “the triple armoury of active powers of nature, the aesthetics of the sublime and the beautiful, and the epistemology of controlled experience.”211 The notion that the aesthetics of nature were critical to human understanding, of course, was not alien to

Enlightenment philosophy. Kant assiduously developed the aesthetic component of the mind’s encounter with nature in the 1788 Critique of Judgment. Aesthetics did not operate in the domain of experimental physics as an interrogation of the criteria for natural beauty, so much as a way of overcoming the representationalist cleft that destabilized sensationist theories of knowledge. Cassirer explains that a rigidly anti- rationalist empirical psychology depends on an irreducible representational structure:

For psychological being remains an irreducible manifold which can be described in its particular forms but can no longer be explained and derived from simple original qualities. If such derivation is to be taken seriously, then the maxim which Locke applied to the realm of ideas must be applied to all operations of the mind. It must also be shown that the apparent immediacy of these ideas is an illusion which does not withstand scientific analysis. Individual acts of the mind, when analyzed, are in no sense original, but rather derivative and mediate.212

The sensate images produced by experiments, then, were capable of producing illusion because they were themselves mere representations. Perhaps one should not be surprised, then, to find theorists of experimental philosophy using terms from dramatic theory to set the parameters of l’art expérimental. The discourse supporting experimental physics picks up the formal elements of mid-century dramatic theory in that it posits itself as a sensual representation of the world’s truth that is haunted by the threat of illusion.

Both Nollet and Diderot indicate that the pursuit of vérité guides experimental physics,

211 Simon Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle,” 2.

212 Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 17-8.

121 and issue warnings about the potential deceptiveness of experiments.213 Nollet urges experimenters not to let a powerful faculty of “pénétration” (shrewdness) lead them into a pitfall: “en allant au devant de ce que l’on ne voit point encore, il est dangereux de se livrer à son imagination, & de se laisser emporter au-delà des bornes d’un sage soupçon, d’un soupçon fondé sur une grande vraisemblance”214 (in going ahead of what one has not yet seen, it is dangerous to be carried by his imagination and to allow himself go beyond the borders of a wise suspicion, a suspicion founded on a great likelihood). The illusion and plausibility necessary to the theatre encroach also on the experimental physicist who must be vigilant not to be swayed by imagination. Other key terms from eighteenth-century dramaturgy appear in mid-century writing on experimental physics.

Just as Dubos in 1719 urged dramatists to moderately combine elements of the merveilleux and the vraisemblable in plays, Nollet warned his colleagues that “L’amour du merveilleux est un poison séduisant dont les meilleurs esprits ont peine à se garantir”215 (The love of the marvelous is a seductive poison which even the best minds cannot be guaranteed to resist).

Not only did the spectatorial practices and social space of the theatre become attached to lecture demonstrations, but the experiments themselves incorporated protocols of repetition, standards of elocution and visual displays that were highly suggestive of theatre practice. The performativity of experimental proofs can neither be shunted into an ancillary role for the knowledge of the natural world that it produced, nor

213 Nollet, Oratio, 11, 17, 19; Diderot, Pensées, 27, 74.

214 Nollet., Oratio, 30.

215 Ibid., 21.

122 disentwined from the theatricality that became its medium. Enlightenment experimental physics practice displayed a compound theatricality. On one level, Fontenelle’s notion of nature as a theatre with hidden secrets continued to suggest that nature masked a hidden mechanism behind the world of appearances. Thus contemplative observations could be deprived of nature’s truth either because of the irreducible representational structure of the senses or because what Diderot termed nature’s “silence capricieux” (capricious silence) deprived the mind of knowledge. On a separate level, experimentation required special contrivances and borrowed from theatrical techniques: repetition, transparency, manipulation of materials, space and time. Experimental physics lecture demonstrations were thus theatrical not just because of their artifice, but also because they amounted to an operation done on nature that defined experimentation as one of the human arts. 216

216 Nollet submits that while observation of nature “épie pour ainsi dire la Nature à dessein de lui surprendre son secret” (spies on nature in a manner of speaking with the aim of overhearing her secret), experimentation “lui fait violence pour la forcer à le dire” (does violence to her to force her to speak it). Ibid., 25.

123 CHAPTER 3

THE ARCHITECTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF SPECTATORIAL FUNCTION

IN FRANCE, 1748-1785

The impulse is given, the public murmurs, it complains about the poor arrangement of theatres; it is time for genius to create. Let us attack the prejudices that bind it, and hope that the taste of artists will be united for the utility of the public.

-Anonymous, 1769

It is quite certain that one must be more a physicist than an architect in order to build the interior of an opera house.

-Chevalier de Chaumont, 1766

In chapter one, I described a mutation in French dramatic theory between 1657 and 1773 that brought the frame of theatrical representation into alignment with the sense-founded, materialist theories of knowledge espoused by mid-eighteenth-century philosophers including Diderot and Condillac. The dramatic theory of Diderot and

Sébastien Mercier is thoroughly compatible with a Lockean formulation of discrete spatio-temporal objects, corresponding impressions received by a sensing subject, and modifications of these impressions resulting in “ideas.” During this period, moreover, techniques associated with theatre spectatorship found a place in the repertoire of educated individuals and were applied to real objects in social and natural domains. Over the course of the first half of the eighteenth-century, enthusiasm for English ideas, a renewed royal and public appetite for theatrical amusements, and emergent para- theatrical public displays of natural phenomena combined to diversify and proliferate

124 spectatorial practices, along with the species of their objects,217 among a burgeoning, self-styled French intellectual class.218

The figure of the spectator introduced in French-language publications came to stand for a set of observational capacities attributed to literate subjects, and by mid- century the spectator had become a referent for sensationist epistemology. By 1746, when Condillac illustrated the mind’s capacity for selectively directing attention with the example of a spectator in a lively theatre who focuses on stage action despite “distracting objects” in the auditorium, the relationship between spectator and stage had become germane to philosophical discussions of the link between sense perception and knowledge. Since Dubos’ 1719 Reflexions, physiological functions that generated consciousness out of sense data had been invoked to explain the effects of theatre upon audiences; at mid-century theatre spectatorship was cited to demonstrate a fundamental capacity of the sensing human machine. The spectator’s fixation on the stage was a prime example of the selective direction of attention toward discrete objective domains, a technique which, as I demonstrated in my previous chapter, was applied to nature as examined by experimental physics.

Addison, Marivaux, and others had presented the literate public with anonymous spectators who prowled public spaces, observing and deciphering the world, and whose wandering cogitations filled the pages of pamphlets and journals. Such a meandering intellectual style was not just a mode of spectatorship, but was adopted also by late

217 The objects—in the sense of aims—of French theatre architecture came to merge with the objects of spectatorial attention, as the spectator occupied an increasingly central place in the reform movement.

218 John Lough, Paris Theatre Audiences in the Seventeenth & Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 163-204. See also Rabreau, Le théâtre et l’embellisement des villes, xvii-xviii.

125 Enlightenment as a mode of philosophical reflection. At the outset of his 1754 Pensées sur l’interpretation de la nature, Diderot divulges that his writing will proceed as if by accident, without the hypotactic order favored by Descartes and Spinoza: “Je laisserai les pensées se succéder sous ma plume, dans l’ordre même selon lequel les objets se sont offerts à ma réflexion, parce qu’elles n’en représenteront que mieux les mouvements et la marche de mon esprit”219 (I will let the thoughts pass through my pen in the order according to which the objects are offered to my reflection, since they will represent the movements and progress of my mind all the better). By the time of the Encyclopédie, whose publication coincided with the most concentrated period of theatre architecture reform in French history, the personnage of the spectator was abstracted into a stock social and intellectual type, rendered into an approximate profile of competencies and tendencies bestowed upon literate subjects by virtue of their more-or-less cultivated observational skills.

Whereas one is tempted to attribute a certain class and intellectual status to the spectator who appears in the documents of theatre architecture reform examined here, one should not glibly assume that this spectator was a bourgeois. Sarah C. Maza has interrogated such habitual social and economic categorizations, arguing that a self- conscious middle class simply did not exist in eighteenth-century France, and citing the universalist rhetoric of the Revolutionary period to further indict historians’ ubiquitous invocations of the bourgeoisie.220 Indeed, there is reason to believe that the spectator I

219 Diderot, Pensées sur l’interpretation de la nature Œuvres complètes de Diderot, Tome IX (Paris: Hermann, 1981), 27.

220 Sarah C. Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

126 have framed was not a circumscribed middle class phenomenon. The Chevalier de

Jaucourt’s Encyclopédie entry under “Spectacle” shows congruence of the spectator’s orientation with the human mind’s relationship to the world at large. Jaucourt explains that

L'homme […] est né spectateur; l'appareil de tout l'univers que le Créateur semble étaler pour être vu & admiré, nous le dit assez clairement. Aussi de tous nos sens, n'y en a-t-il point de plus vif, ni qui nous enrichisse d'idées, plus que celui de la vue; mais plus ce sens est actif, plus il a besoin de changer d'objets: aussitôt qu'il a transmis à l'esprit l'image de ceux qui l'ont frappé, son activité le porte à en chercher de nouveaux, & s'il en trouve, il ne manque point de les saisir avidement.221

(Man […] is born a spectator; the assembly of the whole universe that the Creator seems to deploy for being seen and admired tells us this fairly clearly. Also of all our senses, none is more active, nor enriches us with ideas, more than that of vision; but the more active this sense is, the more it needs to change objects: as soon as it transmits to the mind the image of those that have struck it, its activity carries it off in search of new ones, and if it finds them, it does not fail to seize upon them avidly.)

To judge by Jaucourt’s characterization, the spectatorial function was thought to be universal, and spectatorial practice—whether applied to theatre or to natural spectacle— was by no means restricted to any particular social class. Thus the spectator might be more reasonably, if vaguely, construed as the subject of Enlightenment philosophy, a category that undoubtedly extended over all levels of social class.

Nonetheless, the spectator Jaucourt describes, and who also populates the architectural writings I will examine in this chapter, strongly resembles the voracious, meandering consciousness described by a host of literate, non-aristocratic, eighteenth- century writers. Like Addison and Steele’s narrator, the spectator is anonymous, and historians might be inclined to take him for a clerk, merchant, soldier, artisan or stock-

221 Chevalier de Jaucourt, “Spectacle” Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de Gens de lettres (Paris, 1765), 15:446.

127 jobber; like Marivaux he meanders—his mind alights on objects of fancy ungoverned by an overriding rational faculty. The spectator adopted by French architectural theorists shows signs of having been abstracted from the social facts that determined individual

French theatre-goers, and transformed into an assembly of quasi-mechanical functions grounded in materialist philosophy.

For Jaucourt, the natural, visual confrontation of the individual with the world is the principle motivation for the creation of staged entertainment; the orientation of the sensing subject’s mind is modeled by the structure of theatrical spectatorship. Here vision not only dominates the senses, but its peculiar voraciousness drives a demand for new objects to regard, even if these must be fabricated, “sans nulle réalité” (with no reality whatsoever). 222 Whereas Dubos argued that the human need for an occupied mind (l’esprit occupé) causes audiences to prefer the intense pain of tragedy over the fleeting pleasures of comedy, for Jaucourt, tendencies that comprise vision itself drive an economy of sense stimulation that draws audiences to the stage in search of things to see.223

The spectator, and by synecdoche, the human being, is portrayed by French empiricist philosophy as determined by what Foucault calls “the peculiar functioning” of

222 Ibid.

223 The notion of the spectator’s desire for a plurality of objects cited by Jaucourt in his “spectacles” article was presaged by Condillac in his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines. Condillac declares that the cultivation of human knowledge is favored by “the circumstances we pass through,” of which “the most favorable are those that provide us with the greatest number of objects that may exercise our reflection.” Such a pronouncement is, of course, compatible with lines of argument pursued by d’Alembert, Porée, and others who saw the value of theatre in its educative benefits. While it is well known that Enlightenment advocates of public theatre repeatedly argued that good plays cultivated and enhanced the customs and morals (mœurs) of audiences through a variety of means, the presumed value of reflecting on the plurality of objects offered by the stage has not been studied.

128 the body’s sense organs.224 Such functioning alone, Condillac argued in his 1754 Traité des Sensations, was sufficient to account for the entire range of human knowledge and mental faculties. By way of a thought experiment that conjured up a statue that develops the human senses one after another (odor, then hearing, taste, sight and touch), he argued that a combination of rich sensory input necessarily imbued the mind with the whole ensemble of understanding, desire, judgment, reflection and passions.225 The mind, in effect, consists in nothing but the retention, combination, and modification of sensory impressions that arose more or less by accident as part of man’s struggle to avoid the discomfort of corporeal existence.226

The autonomy of vision that animates both Jaucourt’s cursory theory of spectacle and Condillac’s extreme sensationist account of the origin of understanding will be important to my discussion of optics in the fourth chapter. The mechanically conceived, automated visual perception that inhabits both Condillac’s statue and the edifices of reformist theatre architecture reveals a condition of late Enlightenment philosophy: the spectator-subject is thoroughly stripped of internal self-determination, and overridden by a natural economy of pain and pleasure. Before I posit the links between optics and theatre architecture as symptomatic of an epistemological realignment in early-modern

France, however, I must describe the historico-discursive links between the figure of the spectator and the wave of reform-minded theatre architecture that commenced at mid- century. In this chapter I will argue that the spectator, as taken up by theatre architecture,

224 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1971), 319.

225 Étienne Bonnet de Condillac, Œuvres Complètes, t. 3 (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970) 1-10.

226 Ibid., 121-30.

129 represented an idealized function comprised of various innate human capacities subject to enhancement by architectural means. Spectatorship, for the purposes of architects and architectural amateurs, was reduced to an instantaneous act of sensory perception focused on a present, discrete, or spatio-temporally bounded object.

The instantanaeity of this spectatorial act, of its momentary glance—the coup d’œil—that came to infiltrate architectural discussions of theatre, divulges a process of temporal compression in late Enlightenment aesthetics. In passing from a catoptric, reflective aesthetic to one of dioptric, penetrating transparency, Enlightenment French philosophy and theatre simultaneously shifted from a temporal structure of sustained, rational contemplation to one based on distilled, compressed, instantaneous units of sensory apprehension. This temporal attenuation can be situated among several concurrent cultural and intellectual transmutations that unfolded in the eighteenth century. For one, the non-durational coup d’œil of the spectator, which grasps the stage picture all at once, conforms with the aesthetic of tableau whose development Pierre

Frantz tracks through the second half of the century. The rhetorico-discursive, and therefore syntagmatically-dependent, qualities of classical French drama gave way to a dramaturgy of the frozen pictorial arrangement. What’s more, the coup d’œil stood as a spare and practical element not just for playwrights like Mercier, who wrote of the need

“de rendre ce tableau utile” (to make this picture useful), but also for architects who preferred functional simplicity to overabundant baroque combinations.

The temporal compression that describes the spectatorial coup d’œil, finally, speaks to a fundamental change in the French literate subject’s understanding of the conditions and practical demands of acquiring knowledge: the instantaneous glance was

130 recommended also by the criteria of transparency and acceleration of natural process emphasized by experimental physics. As the contemplative development of natural systematics ceded its central methodological standing to experimental practice, the sequential temporality of rationalist concatenation gave way to disjointed units of knowledge revealed in the spectacular, explosive culmination of some experimental performances. Therefore the architectural distillation of spectatorial function into momentary acts of sense perception reflected nothing less than the Enlightenment subject’s developing techniques for interpreting the world.

The cultivation of this ideal, emphatically visual, spectatorial act emerged on the agenda of theatre architecture reformers as soon as the drive to renovate French theatre architecture gathered momentum in the 1750s, but a survey of writing on theatre architecture between 1748 and 1782 shows that it came to occupy an increasingly central place in debates over the proper form of theatre buildings. Theatre architects came to collate the influences of antique and modern French and Italian models with solutions that conformed to an evolving notion of the spectator’s needs, and followed a wider utilitarian imperative to create buildings supportive of social functions.227 Meanwhile, the spectator’s function as a sensing subject underwent scrutiny and refinement, culminating in the Pierre Patte’s 1782 Essai sur l’architecture théâtrale, wherein the spectatorial function is rationally governed according to the laws of acoustics and optics, the anatomical contours of the ears and eyes, and the geometric (spatial) relationship between these organs and the staged object. The spectator’s encounter with the stage not only absorbed and applied the sensationist presuppositions of the materialist worldview

227 Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

131 dominant among mid-century hommes des lettres and replicated the regard of natural philosophy on stage, it also gradually became the chief concern and founded the spatial relationship of enlightened French theatre architecture.

I. Mid-Century Critiques of French Theatre Architecture

Historians of architecture and theatre alike have located the beginning of a wide- spread movement to reform theatre architecture in France at the mid-century mark. T.E.

Lawrenson, Daniel Rabreau, Pierre Frantz, and Michèle Sajous D’Oria concur with Louis

Hautecoeur that “at mid-century, the ideas change,” though accounts of the cultural forces that propelled the calls for renovation of theatre architecture vary among the scholars. From the vantage of Hautecoeur’s foundational study of French architecture history, public theatre buildings in France, exemplified by modified jeux de paume

(tennis courts) such as the Petit-Bourbon (1547) and the Hotel de Bourgogne (1548), were suddenly found to be “mal commodes,” or ill-fitted to their purpose. In an attempt to address the common complaints from loge occupants on the sides of the house, especially in the notorious places de souffrance near the stage, architects including Le

Vau and Vigarani designed rounded auditoria derived from Vitruvius for the Louvre and at Versailles, but the elongated rectangular tennis court volume continued to dominate

French public theatre architecture well into the reign of Louis XV.228

228 Hautecoeur, Histoire de l’Architecture classique en France, Tome IV, 435-6.

132 Francois d’Orbay’s 1689 Comédie-Française,229 the best-known French theatre building of the Enlightenment era, embodied an architectural practice that critics decried not so much as the result of outworn traditions as the evidence of bad habits.230 D’Orbay recognized the limitations of merely adding a stage and stacks of loges to the gridded volume of the jeu de paume,231 and took measures to alleviate the difficulty of seeing and hearing in the side loges by forming his salle in the shape of a “U” with sides that widened slightly towards the stage.232 Nonetheless, the general arrangement of the house, with a depth far exceeding its breadth and no protrusion of the stage, incurred acoustic and visual problems and prompted sporadic complaints (fig. 3.1).233 Jacques-

François Blondel, the most influential architectural theorist of the century, chose the

Comédie-Française as an example of French theatre architecture in his 1752

L’architecture française not because of its merits as a building, but rather because it was the site of French tragedy and “connu de toute l’Europe par la supériorité des talents de la plupart des acteurs” (known to all of Europe for the superior talents of the majority of its actors), and lamented that “ce n’est point par ce genre d’édifice que notre architecture

229 Dates assigned to theatre buildings in my study will denote dates of completion for both designs and structures, unless otherwise indicated. D’Orbay began work on his theatre in 1687, which was installed in the old jeu de paume on the rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain (today #14, rue de l’Ancienne Comédie).

230 Anonymous, Exposition des principes qu’on doit suivre dans l’ordonnance des theatres modernes (Amsterdam: Librairie C.-A. Jombert, 1769), vii.

231 See Nicole Bourdel, “L’Hôtel des Comédiens Français,” Revue d’Histoire du Théâtre, Tome II, 145.

232 This shape may be indicative of the influence of Gaspare Vigarani, architect of the Salle des Machines (1662) in the Tuileries palace, and the paragon of court theatre architecture in France. Its salle was highly esteemed and may have served as a template for d’Orbay, who consulted Vigarani in the process of designing the building on the Fossés-Saint-Germain. See T.E. Lawrenson, The French Stage in the XVIIth Century: A Study in the Advent of the Italian Order (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1957), 175-8.

233 Hautecoeur notes that Fontenelle may have offered an early complaint about the plight of spectators in the back of the house. Histoire, Tome IV, 436.

133 française mérite quelque estime” (it is not for this type of building that our French architecture deserves any esteem).234

D’Orbay’s theatre, moreover, deviated little from the familiar arrangement of the jeu de paume, whose narrowness, rectilinearity and lack of accommodations for actors and spectators were notorious. Daniel Rabreau has commented that the building merely infuses the traditional renovated tennis court with two Italian elements – the curved rear amphitheatre and the separation of individual loges – while retaining the “elongated rectangle” typical of the seventeenth-century French stage.235 T.E. Lawrenson points out that the complete wall buttressing the “U” of the salle was unique in that it separated the audience space completely from the outer trapezoid of the site’s walls, and provided an enhanced acoustical effect.236 These innovations, however, did not prevent d’Orbay’s building from being grouped with France’s other public theatres in mid-century critiques of “nos salles des spectacles” (“our theatre-halls”). Blondel extended his critique of the building in his Cours d’Architecture, scorning the old Comédie-Française, “dont la véstuste annonce la ruine” (of which the decrepitude announces the ruin), as accessible only “by way of a thousand annoyances.”237 In 1749, La Font de Sainte-Yenne found it difficult “de concevoir que la Capitale du Royaume, n’ait aucune Salle de Spectacles

234 Jacques-François Blondel, J. Gaudet, J.-L. Pascal, Réimpression de L’architecture française de Jacques- François Blondel, Book 3 (Paris: Librairie centrale des beaux-arts, É. Lévy, 1904).

235 Daniel Rabreau, Le Théâtre et l’embellissement des villes, 16.

236 T.E. Lawrenson, The French Stage in the XVIIth Century, 180.

237 Jacques-François Blondel, Cours d’Architecture ou Traité de la Décoration, Distributions & Construction des Bâtiments; Contenant les Leçons données en 1750, & les années suivantes, Tome Second, Chapter VII (Paris: Chez Desaint, Librairie, rue du Foin-S.-Jacques, 1771), BNF ARS. 8o-S15270 (2).

134 digne d’elle” (to conceive that the capital of the realm had no theatre worthy of it).238

Though it offered considerable advantages over other Parisian theatres,239 and was generally well regarded among European theatres, d’Orsay’s building came to be the prime exhibit of a national architectural embarrassment: the current vintage of French theatre could no longer be kept in the old wineskins of the jeu de paume.

Voltaire and Sémiramis

Dissatisfaction with the state of theatre architecture in France was detectable early in the eighteenth century, and by the 1750s, it had begun to crystallize into a multi- faceted critique of theatre design. Voltaire had complained about the state of the French stage in his 1730 Discours sur la tragédie, pointing out the comparative advantage of the

English stage, which “donnent beaucoup plus à l’action que nous, ils parlent plus aux yeux” (give much more to the action than us, they speak more to the eyes).240 The comparison is important not only because it complicates the oft-noted fact that France looked overwhelmingly to Italy for exemplary theatre design and scenic practices,241 but

238 La Font de Saint-Yenne, L’Ombre du Grand Colbert, Le Louvre, et La Ville de Paris, Dialogue (Hague, 1749), BNF 8-Z Le Senne 10798 (1),148.

239 D’Orbay’s building was not without merit, especially considering circumstances of its realisation. The troupe was beset by the anti-theatrical campaigning of clergy members in the seventeenth century, and by 1687, was located in its fourth site. The architect was confronted with an irregularly shaped site, into which he managed to install a salle with a more than 1200 person capacity and a stage that accommodated mechanized scenic effects necessitated by the adoption of the Hôtel de Bourgogne’s repertory in 1680. See Rabreau, Le Théâtre et l’embellisement des villes, 3-15; Charles de Wailly, “Mémoire sur le Projet d’une nouvelle Salle à construire pour la Comédie-Française,” BNF MNS. NAF 2479/416; John Lough, Paris Theatre Audiences in the Seventeenth & Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 173.

240 Voltaire, Dissertation sur la tragédie, Œuvres complètes Vol. 5, 176.

241 The importance of Italian influence upon French theatre architecture reform should not be underestimated, but it has been documented overwhelmingly and to the exclusion of other traditions external to French architecture. T.E. Lawrenson and Martine de Rougement, for example, follow architectural historians including Hautecoeur and Wend von Kalnein in citing the many instances of French

135 also because it shows Voltaire’s early preoccupation with the visual component of spectatorial experience. France held its national dramatic literature in high esteem for its rhetorical sophistication, opposing the value of Racine, whose plays were long thought to be adequately served by the generic scenography of the palais à volonté, to the imagistic illusion of Italian theatre and the trivial spectacle of the English stage.242 Yet the vogue for all things English was directed in the 1740s to the reform of French theatrical literature, scenery and architecture by the returned exile and anglophile Voltaire himself.

Critics including Voltaire railed against French theatre buildings in the 1750s, rejecting virtually every feature of the jeu de paume; the submission of academic, financial, and decorative demands to those of an immediate and compelling salle/scène encounter, however, is forecast in Voltaire’s admiration for English stagecraft and its visual offerings.

Voltaire figured prominently in the push to reform French theatre architecture and stage practices. The debut of his 1748 tragedy Sémiramis stands as one of two mid- century events consistently credited with prompting the reform movement. Sémiramis came to be so closely identified with the need to improve French theatres that architects commonly invoked the play during the decades that followed its debut.243 The play debuted on the 29th of August, 1748 at the Comédie-Française, where, despite a large architects modifying Italian examples. Scholars more concerned with theatre practice, however, like Pierre Frantz, have recently stressed that décor, staging, and other aesthetic performance elements impacted the considerations of theatre architects. See T.E. Lawrenson, “The ideal theatre in the eighteenth century: Paris and Venice,” Drama and Mimesis, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 51-64; Martine de Rougement, La Vie Théâtrale, 155-71.

242 For an analysis of Racinian scenography and a discussion of the classical French disdain for specific staging, see Roger W. Herzel, “Racine, Laurent, and the Palais à Volonté” PMLA, Vol. 108, No. 5 (Oct., 1993), 1064-82.

243 Charles de Wailly, for example, cites Sémiramis in an undated manuscript accompanying plans for the building to replace the Comédie-Française. BNF MNS. NAF 2479/416.

136 claque for Voltaire in the parterre, the play was ambivalently received. It garnered a mixed reception in its opening run, and much laughter was reported at the opening, perhaps the result of a counter-claque planted by loyalists of Voltaire’s rival Crébillon.244

Within a month, the Comédie-Italien had submitted a Sémiramis parody to the censor.245

Numerous factors may have contributed to the play’s mixed reception, including the fact that French audiences were unaccustomed to the portrayal of ghosts on stage.

Legrand, in the role of the Shade of Ninus, provoked laughter when he found his way obstructed by the “petits-maîtres” crowding the stage. A supernumerary guarding the tomb reportedly exclaimed “Messieurs, place à l’ombre!” (Gentlemen, make way for the ghost!), exploding the illusion of immateriality needed to carry off such a supernatural apparition. The incommensurability of conceptual and physical mise-en-scène laid bare at this moment has been credited with spurring the French theatre architecture reform movement. Voltaire was convinced that his disappointment stemmed from the pitiful condition of the French stage—in its most concrete sense.246 In his “Dissertation sur la tragédie ancienne et moderne,” which accompanied the publication of a revised

Sémiramis in 1749, Voltaire rails against the practice of allowing spectators to purchase seats on stage:

Un des grands obstacles qui s’opposent sur notre théâtre, à toute action grande & pathétique, est la foule des spectateurs, confondue sur la scène avec les acteurs ;

244 Charles Collé wrote of the crowd at the debut, “deux ou trois jeunes gens de ce parterre acheté avoient battu des mains en bâillant tout haut, ce qui avoit fait beaucoup rire tout le monde, excepté Voltaire” (“two or three youths in this purchased pit clapped their hands while yawning loudly, which made everyone laugh out loud – except Voltaire”). Quoted by Theodore Besterman in Voltaire’s Correspondence, vol. 16 (Geneve: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1956), 3281n, 60.

245 Charles Augustin Feriol, letter to Nicolas René Berryer, 24 September, 1748. In Theodore Besterman ed. Voltaire’s Correspondence, vol. 16, 3291, 69.

246 Maurice Lever, Théâtre et Lumières: Les spectacles de Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 85- 90.

137 cette indécence se fit sentir particulierement à la premiere représentation de Sémiramis. La principale actrice de Londres, qui étoit présente à ce spectacle, ne revenoit point de son étonnement : elle ne pouvoit concevoir comment il y avoit des hommes assez ennemis de leurs plaisirs, pour gâter ainsi le spectacle sans en jouir. Cet abus a été corrigé dans la suite aux représentations de Sémiramis, & il pourroit aisément être suprimé pour jamais. Il ne faut pas s’y méprendre, un inconvénient tel que celui’là seul, a suffi pour priver la France de beaucoup de chefs d’œuvre qu’on auroit sans doute hazardés, si on avoit eû un théâtre libre, propre pour l’action, & tel qu’il est chez toutes les autres nations de l’europe.247

(One of the greatest obstacles encumbering our theatre, every lofty and pathetic action, is the crowd of spectators mixing on stage with the actors. This indecency was felt especially at the first staging of Sémiramis. The greatest actress of London, who was present at that show, could not overcome her astonishment. She could not conceive of how these men came to be such enemies to their own pleasure, ruining the show in this way without enjoying it. This abuse has been corrected in subsequent stagings of Sémiramis, and it could easily be banished forever. We ought not be deceived: such a hindrance alone has sufficed to deprive France of many a masterpiece that one would have no doubt attempted if one had had a free stage, proper for action, such as is found in every other European nation.)

Voltaire goes on to assail the tumultuous standing parterre section, the decorations of the salle, and the cramped size of French theatre buildings. These grievances derive from a failed encounter between dramatic action and spectator, but expand to include the theatre buildings themselves. Voltaire submits that the shortcomings of French theatre architecture are crippling French dramatic poetry. Great plays are not just diminished by stagings in the jeux de paume; the architectural component of staging in France is so utterly corrupted that some plays cannot be attempted in the first place. This line of argument conforms with the notion that theatre depends on the integrity of the visual image presented to the spectator, and supports the view that theatrical aesthetics had, by mid-century, merged visual pleasure and dramatic action into a poetics of the tableau. Voltaire argues that “un théâtre construit selon les régles” (a theatre built according to the rules) will produce a proper effect on the eyes of

247 Voltaire, “Dissertation sur la tragédie ancienne et moderne,” Les Œuvres Complètes de Voltaire Vol. 30A (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2003), 156-7.

138 the audience. “Il doit en imposer aux yeux qu’il faut toujours séduire les premiers. Il doit être susceptible de la pompe la plus majestueuse. Tous les spectateurs doivent voir

& entendre également, en quelqu’endroit qu’ils soient placés” (It should make a strong impression on the eyes, which it must always seduce first. It should accommodate the most majestic pomp. All the spectators should see and hear equally well, wherever they might be placed).248 This egalitarian impulse couches the reform movement in a wider drive among literate non-aristocrats to redistribute a portion of the theatrical spectacle conferred by an absolutist regime on the King and his coterie.

The preface to Sémiramis thus stands apart from other early published critiques of

French theatre architecture by focusing on the experience of the sensing, attentive spectator as the primary function of that architecture, and urges the enhancement of the former through the reform of the latter. La Font de Sainte-Yenne, in an imagined 1749 dialogue among The Louvre, The City of Paris and The Ghost of the Great Colbert, wrote of Paris’ theatre buildings in the mode of a social engineer. Sainte-Yenne approaches the reform of theatre architecture holistically, citing location, proximity to neighboring buildings, exterior and interior décor, vestibules, stairways, fire prevention, and accommodations for actors, spectators and coachmen, as well as “les avantages les plus commodes & les plus recherchés pour les spectateurs” (the most fitting and studied advantages for the spectators) as the selling points of a project by the architect

Boffrand.249 He treats the salle/scène relationship only in passing in the form of its acoustics, whereas for Voltaire, this relationship is the central, if not the only, plank of

248 Ibid., 158.

249 La Font de Sainte-Yenne, L’Ombre, 148-9.

139 his reform agenda. This disparity suggests that the need to change France’s theatre architecture was expressed in eerily similar form, if for disparate reasons, by theatre practitioners and architects before 1750. Voltaire, the quintessential homme de théâtre, sees the spectatorial coup d’œil, as the subjective basis of the theatre building’s fundamental purpose, and limits his grievances to faults that could be identified from within the house. Sainte-Yenne, on the other hand, critiques theatre architecture as part of Paris’ architectural condition, integrating the building into an organic urban totality.

Just before the mid-century mark, the twinned spectral apparitions of Voltaire’s vanquished Ninus and Sainte-Yenne’s conjuration of Louis XIV’s revered finance minister Colbert gave form to the emergent theatrical and architectural desires to liberate

France from its corrupt and dessicated theatre buildings.

Voltaire’s influence in the push to change theatre spectatorship in France was formidable. He excelled among his contemporaries in producing plays for Comédie-

Française, which was seen as the chief arbiter of literary merit in French theatre, and was fêted extravagantly on its stage after his death in 1778. To whatever degree Voltaire’s personal efforts prevailed upon authorities within the company or the court, his 1749 preface to Sémiramis proved prescient. Ten years after its appearance, the practice allowing spectators on the stage at the Comédie-Française was “supprimé pour jamais.”250 The parterre, “où ils sont gênés & pressés indécemment, & où ils se précipitent quelquefois en tumulte les uns sur les autres, comme dans une sédition populaire”251 (where they are indecently cramped and pressed, and where they from time

250 Voltaire’s friend and ally, the actor Henri Louis Cain (a.k.a Lekain) successfully pled to the ministre de la Maison du roi, that the banquets should be banned on the 29th of January 1759. See Lever, 89-90.

251 Voltaire, Dissertation sur la tragédie, 157.

140 to time cause a ruckus, one on top of the other as in a popular uprising), was gradually mollified by means of police detachments and architectural intervention.252 Charles de

Wailly and Marie-Joseph Peyre’s 1782 theatre for the Comédie-Française (today’s

Odéon), was the first Parisian theatre to feature a seated parterre enforced by permanent rows of benches. Such events reinforce the interpretation that French theatre architecture traced the triumph of the visual mechanics of tableau over the language-based poesis inherited from the Renaissance Aristotelianism. Of course, the implementation of a new theatre architecture could only be carried out by architects, who brought their own set of concerns to the enterprise. It would only be decades later, when theatre architects had reoriented the theory of theatre architecture around the spectator’s view of the stage, that the reform movement could be said to have reached maturity.

Italian Models

Voltaire’s theatrical aesthetic was unquestionably shaped by his time in England.

He makes mention of a memorable coronation scene he witnessed in London, and names

Addison as the English poet closest to capturing the poetic embellishment of nature found in Greek tragedy. He recognized, however, what was widely acknowledged as Italy’s superiority in theatre design:

Que nous sommes loin, sur-tout de l’intelligence & du bon goût qui regne en ce genre dans presque toutes vos villes d’Italie ? Il est honteux de laisser subsister encore ces restes de barbarie dans un ville si grande, si peuplée, si opulente & si polie. La dixiéme partie de ce que nous dépensons tous les jours en bagatelles aussi magnifiques qu’inutiles & peu durables, suffiroit pour élever des monumens publics en tous les genres, pour rendre Paris aussi magnifique qu’il

252 Ravel, The Contested Parterre, 133-90.

141 est riche & peuplé, & pour l’égaler un jour à Rome, qui est notre modèle en tant de choses.253

(Are we not far behind, especially in regards to the intelligence and good taste in this area that reign in nearly every city in Italy? It is shameful to still let these vestiges of barbarity subsist in a city so great, so populated, so opulent and so polite. A tenth of what we spend every day on trifles—as magnificent as they are useless and ephemeral—would pay to erect public monuments of every sort, making Paris as magnificent as it is rich and populated, and let it one day rival Rome, which is our model in so many things.)

Voltaire expressed a view held by many in France, and as he labored over Sémiramis, others in public life were laying plans to bring about precisely the type of urban renewal he envisioned. If the impulse to reform theatre architecture on behalf of playwrights and spectators was given a ghostly and foreboding voice by Voltaire, a corresponding push from France’s architects and urban planners was initiated in 1746, soon after the selection of Madame de Pompadour’s brother Abel Poisson (1727-1781), known as the Marquis de

Marigny after 1754, to succeed her uncle Lenormont de Tournehem as the director- general of the Bâtiments du Roi. Louis XV’s maîtress declarée was, of course, known for her interest in philosophy and the arts, as well as for her considerable political influence. The installation of Tournehem and Marigny at the head of Bâtiments testifies not only to her desire to promote those close to her, but also to her interest in urban renewal. “It was thanks to her that the crown recovered its former leading position as a patron of the arts, and public architecture came back to life.” 254 Madame du Pompadour was also seen on stage at Versailles, where she sang and acted in dozens of roles between

253 Voltaire, Dissertation sur la tragédie, 157.

254 Wend von Kalnein, Architecture in France in the Eighteenth Century, David Britt trans. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 74, 131-2.

142 1747 and 1753;255 it is thus not hard to imagine her preoccupation with the reform of

Parisian public theatres.

Marigny, the scholar Abbé le Blanc, the leading Lyonnaise architect Jacques-

Germain Soufflot, and the engraver for the Menus-Plaisirs and favorite of Mme.

Pompadour Charles-Nicolas Cochin the younger, all toured Italy between 1749 and 1751 in order to prepare Marigny for his new post. This cohort visited dozens of sites, and recorded descriptions of theatre architecture in Turin, Milan, Parma, Regio, Modena and

Vicenza.256 Cochin’s journal of this trip, published in 1758 and again in 1769, includes detailed descriptions and critiques of painted, sculpted, and architectural works, but exhibits a particular attention to ancient and modern theatre buildings. Before his detailed description of the Teatro Regio in Turin, Cochin discloses that “un des principaux objets de curiosité pour ceux qui commencent le voyage d’Italie c’est le théâtre”257 (one of the principle objects of curiosity for those traveling to Italy is the theatre).

The special attention paid to examples of theatre architecture in Cochin’s Voyage d’Italie reflects the widely felt need to improve the architecture of France and its capital

255 Adolphe Jullien, La Comédie à la Cour: Les Théâtres de sociétés royales pendant le siècle dernier (Paris: Fermin-Didot, 1885).

256 Nicolas Marie Potain, an architect and pensionner of the French Academy at Rome, was granted financial support by Ange-Jacques Gabriel to survey and produce plans of the major theatres of Italy between 1745 and 1747. Though little is known about the results of his work, the assignment suggests a desire to benefit from Italian experience in French theatre design. It must be noted, however that the planned Opéra at Versailles, rather than a broader program of reform for French theatres, likely motivated Gabriel, who assumed the post of ‘First architect’ in 1742. See Rabreau, op cit. p. 139; Hautecoeur, op cit. p. 441; Michel Antoine, Louis XV (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 523.

257 Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Voyage d’Italie, ou Recueil de notes sur les Ouvrages de Peinture & de Sculpture, qu’on voit dans les principales villes d’Italie t. 1 (Paris: Chez Ant. Jombert, 1769), 20. Microfilm-xerograph (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1972).

143 city.258 For the King’s advisors and directeur général des Bâtiments this impulse developed quickly into an allied notion that monumental theatre projects could serve as secular modern temples of cultural and moral values. Marigny and the architectural projects that focused the labor of elite architects during his tenure were tied to no explicit program, but favored the view that theatre was vital to public education, suited to the end of cultivating good judgment and refined taste, representative of France’s literary achievements, and a cherished source of pleasure.

The unique attraction of Italy as a source of theatrical models was rooted in a long-standing French tradition of citing Italian masterworks and magnified by a mid- century surge of admiration for antique style and proportion. Many, including Marigny, thought the excesses of the Regency period and of the rococo wanted tempering, and that the more austere practice of Greek antiquity, as updated during the Renaissance by

Palladio and translated into the modern French canon by Mansart, offered an antidote.259

French theatre architecture and stage décor had, moreover, long been borrowed from

Italian sources, whether proximally through Royal commissions of works by architects such as Vigarani, and scenographers including the Bibiena family, or distantly through

Italian and French translations of Vitruvius’ 10 Books and studies of Greek and Roman ruins. Given this tradition, only a long investigative journey to Italy could supply the

258 The Voyage d’Italie manifests the close relationship between Cochin and Marigny, and may reflect Marigny’s opinions as much as Cochin’s. In his preface, Cochin compares his volumes unfavorably to “ces discussions de goût, dans lesquelles vous entriez avec nous sur les divers objets de curiosité qui n’y sont qu’indiqués […] On voit éclorre aujourd’hui les fruits de votre zele, de votre discernement & de vos réflexions.” Voyage d’Italie, t. 1, iv-v. Hautecoeur, moreover, cites Cochin’s truchement, or spokesmanship, for Marigny. See Histoire, t. IV, 75.

259 Marigny’s desire for a counterbalance between ancient and modern style is revealed in a letter to Soufflot, in which he declares “Je ne veux point de la chicorée moderne, je ne veux point de l’austere ancien, Mezzo l’uno, Mezzo l’altro” (I don’t want modern chicory; I don’t want ancient austerity. Half of one, half of the other). Quoted by Svend Eriksen, “Marigny and Le Goût Grec,” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 104, No. 708 (March, 1962), 96-101. See also Von Kalnein, Architecture in France, 131-44.

144 “connaissances nécessaires pour servir dignement un grand Roi dans la direction des monumens qui doivent immortaliser son regne”260 (knowledge necessary to serve a great

King worthily in the direction of monuments that should immortalize his reign).

Cochin’s descriptions of Italian theatre architecture reveal the tastes of Marigny and his Royal architectural coterie, and forecast the general concerns of theatre architecture reform before 1763, the year during which the Paris Opéra burned and plans for a new theatre for the Comédie-Française began to percolate at Bâtiments. Cochin’s assessment of Benedetto Innocente Alfieri’s 1740 Teatro Regio in Turin, in particular, reveals an appreciation among the French voyagers for the ovoid salle, clipped on one end of its major axis by a protruding fore-stage and ringed by partitioned loges (fig. 3.2).

Cochin judges the “truncated egg” shape of the Turin theatre to be “infinitely better” than the long rectangle of French theatres, yet still “disagreeable and irregular” in its own right, and too uniform in the vertical arrangement of its six tiers of loges.261 The character of the loges themselves reveals, for Cochin, another important consideration in assessing Italian theatres:

Les Italiens construisent leurs théâtres relativement à leurs mœurs, qui sont différents des nôtres. Leurs loges sont pour eux un petit appartement, où ils reçoivent compagnie. En effet leurs opera sont si longs, que si l’on ne s’y amusoit d’autres choses, il seroit difficile d’y rester, sans ennui, quatre heures & plus que dure ce spectacle.262

(The Italians build their theatres according to their customs, which are different from ours. For them their loges are a little apartment where they welcome guests. Indeed, their operas are, in effect, so long that if one does not amuse oneself there with other things, it becomes difficult to stay there without boredom, for the four or more hours that the show lasts.)

260 Cochin, Voyage d’Italie, t. 1, iv.

261 Ibid., 20-3.

262 Ibid., 22.

145

The interest in Italian models, universally cited in historical studies as a determining factor in French theatre architecture of the late eighteenth century, was met with a sense that French theatre required a national architectural frame. The Italian spectatorial practice, crucially, proved a temporal mismatch with the French preference for shorter lyric drama. The Italian tendency to linger at the Opera, like the observational practice of natural history described in my previous chapter, tested the patience of French savants.

Despite such reservations, the Turin theatre stood as the most prominent modern theatre model for French architects. The extracts of “Observations critiques sur les Salles des

Spectacle” from Cochin’s Voyage d’Italie published in the September 1758 Mercure de

France include a section on the Turin theatre much longer than that of any other theatre described, and incorporates an expanded discussion of the acoustical and visual qualities of the salle, and of its suitability as a model for France.263

* * *

I submit that the expanded discussion of the Turin theatre in the Mercure signals not just a peculiar interest in this building, but also the beginnings of a gradual assimilation and refinement of spectatorial concerns by architects concerned with theatre.

Cochin makes only passing mention of the spectator’s sensory experience in assessing

Alfieri’s design in his Voyage d’Italie, instead treating the building within a generic architectural lexicon of proportion, regularity and convenance. The expanded, anonymous discussion in the article, however, adds an unfavorable acoustical analysis

263 Mercure de France (September, 1758), 75-86.

146 and commentary on the coup d’œil offered by the proscenium – both of which elements, as I will show, came to be standard inclusions in descriptions of theatre architecture in the decades that followed. The expanded critique of the Turin theatre in the Mercure de

France, therefore, initiated the development of a convention in later, more developed treatises in France by which the spectator’s sensory experience of the stage founds the functional criteria of theatre buildings. It would be years after Marigny and his entourage returned to France, however, before spectatorial and architectural priorities were completely merged.

Of the buildings critiqued in the September 1758 Mercure, Alfieri’s modern

Opera House in Turin received the longest entry, followed by that written for Palladio’s sixteenth-century Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza. Sustained analyses of the two buildings, and of the function and suitability of their application to modern French usage bookend the article, an early sign of the value they would come to assume in the architectural treatises of the 1760s. Palladio’s salle, which assumed the shape of a small, covered

Vitruvian amphitheatre pressed into a half-oval rather than the conventional semicircle,264 is the single most frequently cited Italian theatre building of the modern era within

French architectural publications of the late century (fig. 3.3). Cochin’s notes show that interest in this building was not solely motivated by the reputation of its designer and the elegance of its decorative colonnade. The engraver notes that this arrangement of the amphitheatre conferred an advantage on the spectatorial relationship to the stage as a whole:

264 Palladio may well have opted for a half-oval due to exigencies of the site, which was a small and irregularly shaped.

147 Ce demi-ovale coupé sur la longueur, est le moyen le plus simple & le plus agréable de mettre presque tous les spectateurs en face des acteurs. On ne peut point faire de théâtre où tout le monde soit également bien placé; mais c’est par ce plan qu’on peut approcher le plus près de ce but […].”265

(The half-oval cut along its length is the simplest and most agreeable means of facing nearly all of the spectators towards the actors. One cannot make a theatre where everyone is placed equally well, but with this plan one can get closest to that goal […].)

In the decades that followed Marigny’s educational trip to Italie, architects and amateurs debated the merits of Palladio’s use of the ovoid salle “cut along its length,” contrasting these with the long, narrow arrangement of the oval found in Alfieri’s building, which was closer in form to the elongated volume of the jeu de paume. Cochin proposed a wide salle in the Palladian mode, and expressed admiration for the Teatro Olimpico, but also reservations about adapting “un semblable plan de théâtre à nos usages, dont nous avons la foiblesse de ne sçavoir pas nous départir”266 (a similar theatre plan to our usages, which we are so weak as to not know how to escape). This observation suggests that

French theatre architecture was in something of a double-bind at the outset of the reform movement. Whereas Voltaire had contended that the pitiable state of France’s theatres imposed constraints upon the creative potential of playwrights, here Cochin suggests that the introduction of a radically different theatre architecture was prevented by the habits of

French spectatorial and scenographic usages.

The question of the orientation of the salle with respect to the stage evidently preoccupied Soufflot, designer of France’s first free-standing special use theatre building, the Salle de Lyon, completed in 1756. Soufflot was evidently impressed by Alfieri’s

265 Cochin, Mercure de France (September, 1758), 84.

266 Ibid.

148 Teatro Regio, and sent drawings of the building to Louis XV from Turin in 1750.267 For the future architect of the Pantheon, however, the contrasting orientation of the ovals that formed the Teatro Regio and Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico represented modern and classical approaches respectively. Soufflot had been tasked with designing a new theatre for Lyon years before accompanying Marigny on his educational voyage. In addressing the Académie de Lyon upon presenting designs for the new theatre in Lyon in December

1753 Soufflot explained that his approach was to adapt Italian models without wholly imitating them:

Les spectacles renouvelés dans l’Italie par les Médicis ont éxigé comme chez nous des salles couvertes ; mais les vestiges des anciens théâtres en ayant donné l’idée aux architectes ultra montains, ils les ont construits dans des formes différentes des notres. Celle de Parme, comme par sa grandeur celle de Vérone (sic) par Palladio, ressemblent beaucoup aux théâtres anciens ; celles qui ont été faites depuis en ont à peu près la forme générale, mais les détails en sont différents et elles sont comme les notres, partagées en petites loges et ont jusqu’à 7 rangs les uns sur les autres. J’ai tâché dans les projets que j’ai faites de profiter des avantages que j’ai cru apercevoir dans celles d’Italie et de France et d’éviter les inconvénients que j’ai remarqués dans les unes et les autres.268

(The theatrical spectacles renovated by the Medicis in Italy demanded, as in France, covered auditoriums. But the remains of ancient theatres having given the idea to orthodox architects, they constructed them with different forms than ours. The auditorium in Parma, and, for its grandeur the one in Verona (sic) by Palladio, very much resemble ancient theatres; those that were made later had more or less the same form, but their details are different and are like ours, divided into little loges and having as many as 7 rings, one on top of another. I attempted in the projects I made to make use of the advantages I believed I saw in those of Italy and of France, and to avoid the inconveniences that I noticed in both.)

Soufflot thus perceived a need for synthesis in modern theatre design, and, mindful of both the Turin model and of Vitruvian practice, as well as of the originary

267 Gilles Chomer, “Le Second Voyage en Italie (1750),” Soufflot et son temps: 1780-1980 (Paris: Caisse Nationale des monuments historiques et des sites, 1981), 44.

268 Jacques-Germain Soufflot, “Introduction à l’explication des desseins de la salle de spectacle de Lyon,” printed in L’Œuvre de Soufflot à Lyon: études et documents (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1982), 222.

149 natural provenance of the ancient Greek hillside, opted to subtly modify the long, oval plan exemplified in the Teatro Regio. Soufflot’s Lyon theatre adopted Alfieri’s “œuf tronqué” shape, but set each ascending ring of loges at a slight retreat, infusing the salle with an architectonic derived from the classical “gradins” of the Greek amphitheatre (fig.

3.4, 3.5). Limiting the loges to three, moreover, mitigated the “birdcage” effect of the

Turin Opera. Daniel Rabreau notes of Soufflot’s accomplishment that “il s’agit d’une transposition de la structure inventée par les Grecs, et qui s’était naturellement constituée, chez eux, au flanc des collines”269 (it is a matter of transposing a structure invented by the

Greeks, and which was naturally constituted for them by flanking hillsides). The citation of natural formations, it must be noted, is derived from what he considered to be the originary uses of architecture, and closely related to the well-worn eighteenth-century narrative of the Abbé Laugier’s “primative hut,” which Soufflot cites at length in other papers delivered to the Lyon Academy. This narrative, which organized architectural criteria around the primordial sheltering utility of braced tree limbs, rationalized architecture along theoretical lines similar to those found in Condillac’s account of the origin of language. 270 The instructive power of nature, as we shall see, was an enduring

269 Daniel Rabreau, Le Théâtre et l’embellissement des villes de France au XVIIIe siècle, 135.

270 Jacques-Germain Soufflot, “Memoire pour servir de solution à cette question, sçavoir si dans l’art de l’architecture le goût est preferable à la science des regles…” printed in in L’Œuvre de Soufflot à Lyon: études et documents (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1982) pp. 197-198. For a discussion of the narrative of the primitive hut in eighteenth-century French architecture, see Richard Wittman, “The Hut and the Altar: Architectural Origins and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 36.1 (2007), 235-59.

150 theoretical motif in the work of theatre architects including Soufflot, Charles de Wailly and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux.271

As Michèle Sajous d’Oria has argued, Soufflot’s Lyon Theatre has come to represent an early phase of late-eighteenth-century theatre architecture reform, one in which Italian architectural practice loomed large. In fact, the building reflected the waning of Italian hegemony in modern French theatre design, which had been an unalloyed force since the mid-seventeenth century, and which spurred research trips by

Potain and Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont, as well as Marigny and his entourage during the 1740s. The early guiding assumption of architects and bureaucrats at the Bâtiments du Roi was that the benefits of Italian experiments could be applied to serve the needs of

French audiences, playwrights and performers, but this approach was to gradually yield to more radical, and more nationally individualistic attitudes. Soufflot’s theatre survived until 1827 and spawned many provincial imitations, but by the time Marigny tapped De

Wailly and Peyre to construct a new Comédie-Française in 1767, Lyon’s théâtre à l’Italien was no longer an unrivaled model of the salle/scène relationship.272

II. The Spectatorial Act and Theatre Architecture Reform

During the early phase of the reform movement, the desire for new French theatre practices expressed by Voltaire and others remained by and large separate from the program of architectural and urban renewal that motivated investigations at the Bâtiments

271 Monique Mosser and Daniel Rabreau trace nature as a term in the theoretical writings of these three architects. See “Nature et Architecture Parlante: Soufflot, de Wailly et Ledoux Touchés par les Lumières” in Soufflot et l’architecture des lumières (Paris: Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1986), 223-9.

272 Michèle Sajous d’Oria, Bleu et or: La scène et la salle en France au temps des Lumières (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2007), 42-3.

151 du Roi. The dissatisfaction with France’s theatre buildings was widespread and attached itself to a list of grievances shared by architects and hommes du théâtre, but architects had yet to rigorously theorize the salle/scène relationship. The first “monumental” theatre built in France, moreover, was recognized to be a borrowed Italian solution with subtle modifications. In the years after the construction of the Salle de Lyon, however, the psychological aesthetics that undergirded Diderot’s dramatic theory began to infiltrate the program of theatre architecture reform. Printed and manuscript sources reveal that theatre architects, in both theoretical and practical writings, came to assess the spectator’s sensory encounter with the stage as the basis of the spatial relationship that founded theatre design in general. This sensory encounter underwent modifications of its own, engaging in a process of theorization, refinement, and mutual articulation with theatre architecture. By the end of this period, which saw the proliferation of “ideal” theatre designs, the spectator’s momentary apprehension of the stage dominated French theatre architecture theory, and gave rise to a distinct theatrical architectonics.

The architectural assimilation of spectatorial function manifest in visual and textual sources shows the gradual refinement of an ideal, sensory spectatorial act, and its translation into a corresponding spatial architectonics. Plans, treatises and public letters suggest that between 1748 and 1782, three distinct features emerged in the proscriptions of architects and amateurs interested in theatre design: First, while the demand for spectatorial intervisibility remained active throughout this period, it ceded priority to a desire for the spectator’s unencumbered visual embrace of the entire proscenium frame.

This emphasis on immanence between subject and object helps account for a sustained campaign to eradicate not only the notorious onstage banquets, but also petites loges

152 installed in the side of the arch. Second, architects sought a wider stage than was offered in the jeux de paume, and proposed the radical new scenic device of the three-part stage in order to expand the spectatorial field of vision. Finally, the spectator, whose spatial relationship to stage objects came to prevail among architectural concerns, was abstracted, and became little more than the site of a momentary, and largely visual act of perception – a coup d’œil or glance. This coup d’œil came to serve architectural theory as the atomic unit of spectatorial consciousness, and the subjective correlate of the tableau, which Pierre Frantz characterizes as a new unit of dramatic action.273 Together, these three features of theatre reform in Enlightenment-era France depict an architectural practice overwhelmingly disposed to invoking the epistemological touchstone of optical science.

Soufflot’s theatre in Lyon was widely praised and considered to have improved on the standard architectural practice in France, but it was by no means seen as the culmination of theatre architecture reform. In letters discussing a new building for the

Comédie-Française, a project originally intended for Soufflot, Marigny expressed interest in a theatre disposed similarly to that at Lyon, but came eventually to endorse the circular designs of Peyre and De Wailly.274 Moreover, despite Hautecoeur’s claim that the ellipsoidal salle dominated French theatre design of the era, the majority of prominent theatres realized in Paris and the provinces after 1770 take the circle for their basic interior shape. Circular plans governed the monumental projects of De Wailly and Victor

273 Pierre Frantz, L’esthétique du tableau, 153-7.

274 Marigny, letter to Soufflot dated 18 May 1763, AN O1 1252, #28.

153 Louis in the decade before the revolution.275 The debate concerning the optimal plan geometry for enforcing the spectatorial encounter remained active during the third quarter of the century largely due to both the lack of a settled theory of acoustics276 and the fact that spectatorial practices themselves were the subject of reform.

The elimination of on-stage seating, which took effect at the Comédie-Française after the 1759 Easter hiatus, amounted to the mandatory separation of actors and spectators, and was received by observers as being a boon for theatrical illusion. Collé wrote of the new regulation that it “fait le meilleur effet du monde; je crus m’apercevoir que l’on entendait infiniment mieux la voix des acteurs. L’illusion théâtrale est actuellement entière […]”277 (creates the best effect in the world; I believe I perceive that one hears the voice of the actors infinitely better. The theatrical illusion is now complete

[…]). The reform long called for by Voltaire, Diderot, and other hommes du théâtre was reported to have improved the vocal projection of the actors, eased entrances and exits, and cleared the wings for enhanced decoration. As an enhancement of illusion and vraisemblance, however, the new integrity of stage picture ensured by spectatorial reorientation was considered vital to the core aesthetic function of theatre. Before 1760, the protocols of spectatorship had scarcely been settled in Paris’ public theatres, much

275 Hautecoeur, 439-45. The most prominent theatre buildings in France as of 1800 incorporated circular or approximately circular auditoria, including Peyre and De Wailly’s theatre and Victor Louis’ buildings in Bordeaux and Paris. See Jacques-Auguste Kaufmann, Architectonographie des Theatres, où Parallèle Historique et Critique de ces Édifices, Considérés sous le rapport de l’Architecture et de la décoration; Commencé par Alexis Donnet et Orgiazzi (Paris: Chez L. Mathias (Augustin), 1837).

276 Voltaire, in a letter to Jean Joseph Rossignol dated 6 November 1757, observed that “Nous ne pouvons avoit autant de connaissance sur l’acoustique, que sur l’optique. Les sons ne donnent pas autant de prise à la géométrie que la lumière” (We can’t have as much understanding of acoustics as of optics. Sounds give less purchase to geometry than does light). Voltaire’s Correspondance, letter 6753. See also Izenour, Theater Design, 52-9.

277 Charles Collé, cited in Frantz, L’esthétique du tableau, 46.

154 less applied to architectural projects, but as influential spectators began to publicly call for theatre architecture reform, the two agendas merged into one.

Diderot praised Soufflot’s new theatre in the 1757 Entretiens sur le Fils Naturel;

Dorval asks the narrator “Avez-vous vu la salle de Lyon? Je ne demanderais qu’un pareil monument dans la capitale, pour faire éclore une multitude de poèmes, et produire peut-

être quelque genres nouveaux” (E 111) (Have you seen the theatre in Lyon? I would ask only for a similar monument in the capital in order to give birth to a multitude of dramatic poems, and for producing, perhaps, a few new genres). Elsewhere in Diderot’s text, however, Dorval shows a desire for a wider stage than that offered by the “œuf tronqué,” and more in line with Voltaire’s call for a stage that can represent multiple locations:

Je ne demanderais, pour changer la face du genre dramatique, qu’un théâtre très étendu, où l’on montrât, quand le sujet d’une pièce l’exigerait, une grande place avec les édifices adjacents, tels que le péristyle d’un palais, l’entrée d’un temple, différents endroits distribués de manière que le spectateur vît toute l’action, et qu’il y en eût une partie de cachée pour les acteurs (E 111).

(I would only ask, in order to change the face of the dramatic genre, for a very extended stage, where one shows, when the subject of a play demands it, a large plaza with adjacent buildings such as the peristyle of a palace, the entrance to a temple, different locations distributed in such a way that the spectator views all of the action, and that there be a hidden place for the actors.)

This echoes Voltaire’s 1749 demand for a wide stage capable of rendering several loci, and implies that a wide stage better accommodates the spectatorial view. Dorval adds that current French theatres leave much to be desired when compared to their ancient Greek antecedents, which allowed enough space for the representation of simultaneous action. On the French stage, “On n’y peut jamais montrer qu’une action, tandis que dans la nature, il y en a presque toujours de simultanées, dont les représentations concomitantes, se fortifient réciproquement, produiraient sur nous des

155 effets terribles” (E 112) (One can never show but one action, while in nature, there are almost always simultaneous ones of which concomitant representations, reciprocally fortifying each other, would produce tremendous effects on us). As I explained in chapter one, the convergence of the Enlightenment subject’s vantage on the natural world with the spectator’s view of the objects of theatrical representation partially determined the contours of a shift in French dramatic theory between the mid-seventeenth and mid- eighteenth centuries. Diderot demonstrates, in the above comparison, that this alignment was thought to be germane to theatre architecture by 1757; the observation of nature consolidated its status as a model for spectatorial consciousness, and was applied to

Diderot’s prescriptions for theatre architecture.

Furthermore, plays stand to be temporally compressed by a theatre capable of accommodating simultaneous scenes. Dorval’s lament that scenery cannot currently be changed except between acts would be addressed by presenting separate locations at once

(E 86), and the implied shortening conforms with the tableau aesthetic, which favors the instantaneous apprehension of the visual field over the sequentiality of the text. In a development that conformed with this aesthetic shift from hypotypose, or the poetic and rhetorical stimulation of mental images, to the affective payload of tableaux, theatre architects between 1750 and 1780 increasingly stressed the spatial/optical field of spectatorial consciousness at the expense of temporal considerations. During the 1750s theatre architecture had yet to incorporate a coherent theory of spectatorial practice. By

1760, however, Diderot was joined by other spectatorially-minded architectural amateurs who argued that the reform of theatre design should first and foremost serve the spectator’s sensory encounter with the stage.

156 In December of 1760, Élie Catherine Fréron, editor of the Année Littéraire, authored a ten-page commentary on the state of France’s theatres and the need for their replacement. His “Réfléxions sur les Salles de Spectacles” was not the first published critique of French theatre architecture written by a non-architect, but its length and singular focus stand in contrast to the passing comments offered by Voltaire and Diderot,

Fréron’s avowed intellectual adversaries. He nonetheless concurred with the philosophes on the need for alternatives to the jeux de paume, “où la meilleure place pour voir est la plus mauvaise pour entendre & réciproquement”278 (where the best place for seeing is the worst place for hearing and vice versa), and added several original points of analysis into the emerging public debate on the topic.279

For Fréron, theatres must balance two competing principles: they should contain the greatest possible number of spectators, and all of the spectators should be equally well placed to see and hear. Accordingly, the circle, rather than the ellipse truncated along its long or short axis, holds the most promise for a salle to accomplish these two goals at once. Fréron cites the circle’s unexcelled ratio of circumference to area, and notes that antique theatres employed semi-circular auditoria. He later concedes that the limited length of standard wooden beams for the proscenium arch constrains the width of the stage opening, and with it the lateral dimension of the whole interior, a fact that, in conjunction with the need to maximize capacity, might call for slightly stretching “la

278 Élie Catherine Fréron, “Réfléxions sur les Salles de Spectacles,” L’année littéraire (Amsterdam: Chez Lambert, 1760:8), 100.

279 Fréron tended to embody a conservative foil to Voltaire and La Harpe, but his views on dramatic theory should not be portrayed as traditionalist. His ambivalence toward the Aristotlean unity of place, in particular, suggests both a reformist streak in theatrical matters and a disposition towards precisely the staging innovations proposed by Voltaire and others. See Robert L. Myers, “Fréron’s Theories of Tragedy,” The French Review, Vol. 31, No. 6. (May, 1958): 503-8.

157 forme circulaire en passant à l’elliptique”280 (the circular form into an ellipse). This proviso, though, is far from an endorsement of the narrow, elliptical shape Soufflot borrows from Alfieri. Fréron prefers a theatre of a form later endorsed by Milizia and

Ferrarese in 1773 (fig. 3.6) and by Andre Roubo in 1777 (fig. 3.7), where the circle of the salle is more or less bisected by the leading edge of the fore-stage, such that the rings of loges and the semicircular gradins of the amphitheatre are uniformally arranged around the down stage center zone. While mention of antique semicircular auditoria and of

Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico buttress the journalist’s argument for a circular theatre hall, practical considerations related to spectatorial function take precedence over appeals to canonical models. In Fréron’s public letter one detects the problem of finance in eighteenth-century building projects. Architectural proportions were ever subject to the fiscal demand of la rentabilité and to the desires of swelling public audiences;281 this fact tended to submit form to function, and function to a linear, object-driven spectatorial act.

Fréron makes the spectator’s sensory relationship with the stage the central factor in his analysis. He condemns status quo French public theatres for failing to provide good placement vis-à-vis the stage, but rehearses none of the usual complaints about bland façades, limited street access, or lack of backstage accommodations for actors commonly enumerated by architects like Blondel. The stage encounter not only marginalizes, but altogether displaces mention of such convenances. It is critical to note, moreover, that for Fréron the essential spectatorial function is depicted as overwhelmingly visual. Acoustical properties are not ignored in his comments, but

280 Ibid., 108.

281 Lough, 167-85.

158 receive scant analysis compared to their visual counterparts. Fréron speaks of the rectangular form of the jeu de paume, “à laquelle les yeux étoient accoûtumés”282 (to which the eyes are accustomed), and his advocacy for a shallow stage is based entirely on the “vûe d’œil” (eye’s view), with no mention of acoustical factors. Fréron’s ocularcentrism is not atypical of late Enlightenment French journalism,283 but his favoring of the spectatorial view in what amounts to an abbreviated architectural treatise forecasts the core agenda of mainstream theatre architecture reformers in the critical period of the 1760s.

The “Réfléxions sur les Salles de Spectacles” spurred responses that ran in the

Année Littéraire later that year,284 and opened a public discussion of the optimal interior form for theatre buildings. The anonymous author of a letter that ran in the May 1761

Mercure de France cited Frérons “Réfléxions,” and offered the insights of one with more intimate knowledge of the architect’s trade. This self identified “Artiste,” whom Daniel

Rabreau suspects to be Charles-Nicolas Cochin,285 writes with an appreciation for the compound architectural challenges involved in theatre design, and does not restrict him or herself to analysis of the salle/scène relationship:

[…] malgré toutes les études que j’ai faites pour trouver une forme avantageuse à tous égards, tant dans la partie des Plans, que dans celles des coupes & elévations intérieures, qui sont les éssentielles, quoique les extérieures demandent un caractère distinctif qui les annonce, soit par des portiques ou péristiles où l’on doit trouver tous les abris convenables & toutes les issues pour le concours des

282 Fréron, 100.

283 The Année Littéraire, the Mercure de France, and other publications are permeated with visual and ocular figures.

284 Anonymous, “Lettre à M. Fréron au sujet des Réfléxions sur les Salles de Spectacles en France,” L’année littéraire (Amsterdam: Chez Lambert, 1760:8), 285-6.

285 Daniel Rabreau, Le théâtre et l’embellisement des villes, 785.

159 amateurs de Spectacles ; je peux vous assurer que sans sortir du proscenium, l’on peut dire avec juste raison que la critique est aisée, mais l’art difficile.286

([…] in spite of all the studies I’ve done in order to find a form advantageous in all respects, as much in plans as in sections and interior elevations, which are those that are essential, although exteriors demand a distinctive character that announces them, either by way of porticos or peristyles where one should find every accomodating shelter and all the exits for theatrical enthusiasts; I can assure you that, without leaving the proscenium, one might rightly say that criticism is easy, but the art difficult.)

The claim that plan drawings, and interior elevations and sections constituted the

“essential” instruments for rendering a theatre shows the escalating importance of the spectatorial function in the widening architectural debate.

The author of the Mercure letter offers a qualified defense of Soufflot’s Lyon theatre, which Fréron had said showed signs of fear of deviating from accepted practice, but concedes that the semi-circular and wide semi-elliptical forms “sont à la vérité les meilleures à tous égards”287 (are in truth the best in all respects). Nonetheless, such an auditorium, which is significantly wider than the proscenium ouverture, presents challenges that the author proceeds to enumerate: first, significant portions of the loges next to the stage on either side “perdroient-elles pour la vue des décorations & des coups de Théâtre” (would lose the view of the decorations and striking moments of stage action); second, the vast diameter of the auditorium might force an inordinately high vaulting structure; finally, the author worries that such a vast salle, unless divided into sections for the various levels of society (états), would produce chaos.288 Without directly indicting Fréron’s two principles, the “Lettre sur les Salles de Spectacle” points

286 Anonymous, “Lettre sue les Salles de Spectacle,” Mercure de France (May, 1761), 139-40.

287 Ibid., 143.

288 Ibid., 143-4.

160 out numerous complications involved in realizing novel theatre plans, and amounts to an architect’s response to the exuberant demands of the spectatorially-minded amateur and homme de lettres.

The public exchange of ideas and proposals for a renovated French theatre architecture at the turn of the 1760s provides an excellent perspective on the evolving relationship between theatre practice and the architecture designed to house and support it. While Diderot pressed for a radical new approach to theatrical genre, perforating the academically sanctioned barrier between staged and factual states of affairs, the practice of spectatorship itself underwent a metamorphosis, which, by contrast, sought to enforce a spatial and architectural boundary between the zone of representation and the social arena dedicated to its witness. During the course of the 1750s, dissatisfaction with staging practices at the Comédie-Française expanded into a critique of French theatre architecture in general, but the grievances voiced by spectators and playwrights only gradually infiltrated the agenda of professional architects. The author of the 1761

“Lettre,” who claimed to have measured the famous theatres of Italy and implied that he or she has studied the problems of theatre design professionally, signals an important develoment in the history of French theatre architecture. Architects, as calls for reform multiplied assimilated the demands of a spectatorship for which the separation of salle and scène was paramount, and for whom the unencumbered sensory encounter with the stage was the central practical concern of theatre design.

* * *

161 The convergence of spectatorial and architectural priorities around 1760 did not develop as a merely theoretical concern. The drive to replace French theatre buildings gathered momentum with the completion of Le Théâtre et l’Hôtel de l’Intendance in

Metz in 1759, and with the opening of an Italian-style salle the same year in Clermont-

Ferrand.289 Complaints about Paris’ theatre architecture, as we have seen, were routinely published in the early years of the Encyclopédie’s run, and were discussed at the

Bâtiments du Roi. By 1761, the Marquis de Marigny had begun to write Soufflot at the behest of the King, instructing the architect to begin designs for a new building to replace

D’Orbay’s maligned Comédie on the rue des Fossés Saint-Germain.290 Though Soufflot would eventually cede this project to Peyre and De Wailly, his correspondence with

Marigny – and an undated theatre design now kept in the Bibliothèque Nationale – shows his attention to the project in the early 1760s.291

One week before the signing of the Treaty of Paris in February of 1763, Marigny wrote a letter to Soufflot that included a line in Italian: “Non dementicar si del nostro pensiere toccante alla comedia francieze nel palazzo conti”292 (Don’t forget our thoughts touching on the Comédie-Française in the Plaza de Conde). On April 6, 1763, however,

Richelieu’s Opéra du Palais Royal burned, and two unanticipated new projects suddenly occupied the King’s architects: a temporary opera based “ligne pour ligne” upon the

289 Pierre Frantz and Michèle Sajous D’Oria, Le Siècle des Théâtres: Salles et scènes en France 1748-1807 (Paris: Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, 1999), 131-2, 136.

290 Daniel Rabreau, Le théâtre et l’embellissement des villes, 148.

291 Wend von Kalnein asserts that a plan and an elevation housed at the Bibliothèque Nationale are probably the work of Soufflot. See BNF EST. Zf.126 Fol; Von Kalnein, Architecture in France in the 18th Century, 179.

292 Letter dated February 2nd, 1763, AN O1 1252, #27.

162 destroyed Opera, which Soufflot and Gabriel were charged with installing on the stage of the defunct Salle des Machines des Tuileries (fig. 3.8),293 and a permanent replacement assigned to Moreau-Desproux, the city architect of Paris (fig. 3.9).294 Soufflot and

Gabriel’s temporary structure opened late in 1763, and upon completion of Moreau-

Desproux’s building in 1770, the comédiens du roi were transplanted to the temporary structure on the stage of the Salle des Machines while awaiting the completion of a new

Théâtre de la Nation. Paris’ theatre buildings began to transform, and the public did not lack for ideas concerning their improvement.

The 1763 Paris Opera fire accelerated a theatre architecture reform movement that had already issued public calls for new theatre designs.295 Fréron in 1760 had proposed that prizes be offered to young architects in order to promote new designs for theatres.

This wish would eventually be met when the Académie d’Architecture called for theatre designs for the Prix de Rome prize of 1768.296 Fréron’s respondant in the Mercure, however, had argued that such calls for designs should not be restricted to young aspirants, but rather issued to “tous ceux qui pourraient prétendre à remplir des places d’Architecte du Roi & de Membre de son Académie”297 (all those who aspire to fill the post of King’s architect and member of his academy). Indeed, architects in the King’s direct employ had begun to produce innovative new theatre designs by 1763, and during

293 Marigny ordered Soufflot to quickly erect this temporary structure after the burned Opera, and continued to push him to speed this project well into the autumn months. See AN O1 1683, 48-94.

294 Daniel Rabreau, Le théâtre et l’embellissement des villes, 156.

295 Martine de Rougement, La vie Théâtrale, 167; Pierre Frantz and Michèle Sajous D’Oria, Le Siècle des Théâtres, 19-20.

296 Von Kalnein, Architecture in France in the 18th Century, 178.

297 Anonymous, Mercure de France, May 1761, 141.

163 the following three years Paris witnessed the publication of the first in a series of architectural treatises dedicated solely to France’s theatrical needs.

Marigny’s letters, considered alongside the radical theatre plans produced in the mid-1760s testify to an active debate at the Bâtiments du Roi over fundamental salle geometry and arrangement of spectators. Even as Marigny exhorted Soufflot to hurry the provisional Opera building in May, he conveyed Louis XV’s desire to move ahead with plans for a new Comédie-Française:

Le Roy m’a encore demandé si je m’occupais serieusement de la nouvelle Salle de Comédie, […]. Nombre d’ideés me passent par la teste, et comme de raison je les soumets a votre talent et a vos lumieres. Je voudrais que la forme de la salle fut, non pas le demi-cercle, mais la moitie et en peu plus de l’ovale parfait pris dans son grand diamettre.298

(The King has asked me again if I was seriously occupied with the new hall for the Comédie, […]. A number of ideas are on my mind, and so I rightfully submit them to your talent and enlightenment. I would like the form of the hall to be, not a semi-circle, but a little more than half of a perfect oval taken on its major axis.)

Marigny was to remain occupied with the new theatre for the Comédie-Française until his tenure as director of Bâtiments du Roi concluded in 1773, and he was swayed eventually by De Wailly’s arguments for a round auditorium.299 Nonetheless, no consensus favored one shape of theatre interior over another during the 1760s, and France’s “ideal theatre” remained an object in flux. There is evidence, however, that plans based on Palladio’s ellipse with the stage forming one side of its length gained favor among Marigny’s colleagues in the middle of the decade.

298 AN O1 1252, #28.

299 Plans submitted by Peyre and De Wailly in 1769 and 1770, and subsequently approved by Louis XVI, were based on a circular auditorium plan. Versions of these designs were shown at the Salon of 1771, but the final version of the building had a slightly oblong shape to accommodate more spectators. See Rabreau, ibid., pp. 187-188; Allan Braham, “Charles de Wailly and Early Neo-Classicism,” The Burlington Magazine, (1972), 673, 676.

164 Designs for a playhouse based on the fundamental geometry of Palladio’s Teatro

Olimpico were produced between 1763 and 1765 by Nicolas-Marie Potain, head designer for Ange-Jacques Gabriel, the King’s chief architect (fig. 3.10, 3.11).300 Potain, who in

1745 had been tasked with studying Italy’s theatres in anticipation of the Opéra Royal de

Versailles project, had also shared the company of Cochin during Marigny’s Italian voyage. His theatre project, a square building for which a diagonal axis aligns the wide, oval auditorium and large central stage, includes numerous innovations. Actors and spectators are served by green rooms and a café; a broad, continuous amphitheatre before the first ring of loges flares near either side of the proscenium to minimize places de souffrance; “petits Théâtres” with separate scenic installations flanking the central “grand

Théâtre,” creating a triple perspective stage. This triple stage suggests that Potain was sympathetic to those who saw theatre architecture reform as a means to overhaul the conditions of spectatorship and scenographic practice: the scene visible in Potain’s transverse section tellingly depicts Voltaire’s Sémiramis.301

Potain’s credentials locate him at the heart of France’s academic and architectural establishment, so it is all the more striking to discover in his work signs of a spectatorial aesthetic steeped in Lockean epistemology.302 In the 1767 edition of his treatise on the proportions of the classical column orders, Potain emphasizes ocular function. Whereas

300 Hautecoeur claims Potain’s project, which resides in the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, appeared in 1763, which contrasts with Michel Gallet’s assessment of 1765. The likelihood that Cochin based his 1765 “Projet d’une Salle de Spectacle” on Potain’s concept may suggest that Potain was the first to adapt Palladio’s model to modern use. See Hautecoeur, 441; Louis Hautecoeur, “Projet pour une salle de spectacle en 1763,” L’Architecture, 1926, 31-6 (BNF SPE. Rt 12009); Michel Gallet, “Nicolas-Marie Potain,” Les Architects Parisiens du XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: Éditions Mengès, 1995), 412-3.

301 Pierre Frantz and Michèle Sajous D’Oria, Le Siècle des Théâtres, 24.

302 Potain attended the Académie d’Architecture and won its Prix de Rome in 1738. See Michel Gallet, ibid., 412.

165 gothic architecture, he observes, conveys an “excess of lightness” to the eyes,

“l’architecture grecque, au contraire, a son principe dans la solidité non seulement réelle, mais même apparente, parce qu’il ne suffit pas de faire un édifice solide, il faut encore qu’il tranquillise l’œil du spectateur”303 (Greek architecture, on the contrary, has its basis in a solidity that is not just real, but even apparent, since it is not enough to make a building solid, it must also relax the eye of the spectator). Potain, like Jaucourt in the

Encyclopédie, grants visual sense a certain measure of autonomy, and also demonstrates that mid-century French architects thought their craft to be theatrical – capable of presenting an appearance that does not necessarily reflect an underlying reality.

Potain not only embodies a significant link between the spectatorial and architectural approaches to theatre architecture reform, but also exhibits the compatibility of early neo-classical architecture with sensationist aesthetics among the Architectes du

Roi. Whether his spectatorial mindset is best explained by the gradual permeation of theatre architecture practice by the agenda of a burgeoning, reformist public spectatorship, or by an independent architectural absorption of empirico-materialist theories of sense,304 Potain’s citation of Sémiramis suggests that by the mid-1760s, architects no longer approached the problem of theatre design from a fundamentally different vantage than did spectator-intellectuals like Voltaire, Diderot and Fréron. The optique du théâtre subsumed whole architectural works, as well as the performances they enclosed. For architects increasingly cognizant of the spectatorial function of theatre

303 Nicolas-Marie Potain, Traité des Ordres d’Architecture, (Paris: Chez Jombert, 1767). Quoted in Michel Gallet, ibid., 413.

304 Daniel Rabreau, Le Théâtre et l’embellisement des villes, xxxvii.

166 buildings, theorizing the spectatorial act was only a matter of redirecting the ideal gaze of projective geometry towards the stage.

Potain’s design, which was not publicly circulated, was likely the basis for C.-N.

Cochin’s Projet d’une Salle de Spectacle pour un Théâtre de Comédie, published in

1765. Cochin admits that his design is not original, calling it “le théâtre de Palladio appliqué a nos usages” (Palladio’s theatre applied to our use), and divulging that “un des plus célebres Architects de nos jours en a composé deux dans cette même forme; l’un pour une salle d’Opera, l’autre plus petit pour un théâtre particulier”305 (one of the most celebrated architects of our day has composed two of the same form: one for an opera house, the other, smaller, for a private theatre).306 Cochin’s treatise, unlike prior architectural discussions of theatre, is devoted solely to the inside of a theatre, and indicates a trend toward focusing theatre architecture theory on the spectator’s sensory encounter with the stage. “Il n’est question ici que de la forme interieure de la salle, pour la rendre propre à ce que le plus grand nombre des spectateurs y soit placé avantageusement pour voir & pour entendre”307 (Here it is only a question of the interior form of the hall, for rendering it such that the greatest number of spectators might be placed there advantageously to see and hear). Though as a draughtsman Cochin would have been accustomed to depicting buildings as adumbrated wholes, in the Projet he isolates the interior disposition of the theatre and ignores the exterior mass, decorations,

305 C.-N. Cochin, Projet d’une Salle de Spectacle pour un Théâtre de Comédie (Paris: Chez Jombert, 1765), 1.

306 Potain was identified as the “architect célebre” in question in a 1769 treatise variously attributed to G. M. Monginot and the Chevalier de Chaumont. See Exposition des Principes qu’on doit suivre dans l’ordonnance des Théâtres Modernes (Paris: Chez Jombert, 1769), xv.

307 C.-N. Cochin, Projet d’une Salle, 3.

167 and standard accessories of theatre architecture; his illustrated plates display a theatrical interior with no sign of a sheltering structure (fig. 3.12). Theatre architecture reform is here distilled to a central problematic: the cultivation of a stage-directed spectatorial act composed of sound and sight.

For Cochin, the deficiency of France’s theatres consists of two glaring faults: first,

French auditoriums are too deep, so that the back of the house, where the view of the stage is best, is also the worst section for hearing the actors; second, the majority of loges are placed in such a way that many spectators struggle to see the stage. Cochin’s solution molds the loges and amphitheatre into a wide, Palladian-style ellipse around an avant- scène that protrudes into the center of the salle. Cochin remarks that this plan addresses the acoustic deficit both by bringing the back of the house considerably closer to the actor so that the majority of loge occupants are roughly equidistant from the front of the stage, and by preventing actors’ voices from “se perdre dans les coulisses”308 (being lost in the wings).

The engraver, moreover, asserts that such a theatre not only would improve the audience’s ability to hear the voices of actors, but would also enhance performances by relieving actors of the need to shout in order to be heard in the deep recesses of the house:

“Il paroît du moins que c’est ce qu’on a à desirer dans un théâtre où tout doit être déclamé le plus naturallement qu’il est possible”309 (It seems at least that it is what one desires in a theatre where everything should be declaimed as naturally as possible). According to

Cochin, the wide range in distance separating members of the audience from the stage

308 Ibid., 6.

309 Ibid., 11.

168 distorts the spectatorial experience and threatens stage illusion. He notes that occupants of the loges nearest the stage suffer in this way, since being so close to the actors, “ils ont le désagrément d’entendre les efforts de respiration qui s’ensuivent de la nécessité de se faire entendre jusqu’au fond d’une salle très profonde, & ils sont exposés à appercevoir les contractions des muscles du visage qu’occasionnent ces efforts”310 (They are condemned to hear the breathing efforts that come with the need to be heard all the way in the back of a very deep house, and they are made to witness the muscular contractions of the face that accompany these efforts). Cochin thus links the reform of theatre design to a physiologically-minded critique of acting style:311 an actor should not be forced to play to the back of a excessively long house, lest the interaction between performance and architecture “rend son jeu forcé & hors de la nature”312 (render his portrayal forced and unnatural).

Cochin advocated strongly for a shallow stage and wide house on acoustical grounds, though he also believed the radical widening of the interior stood to enhance the audience’s unobstructed views of decorated perspective scenery. His Palladian-style salle would improve the overall clarity and naturalness of theatre’s aural component, but it would also eliminate the need to stand in the side boxes to see the stage, and behind the pillars that obstructed one’s view (vue) of the stage. Cochin’s sight-oriented program

310 Ibid., 12.

311 Joseph R. Roach has commented upon an expansion of physiological knowledge in the 1760s, “complicating and deepening the bases on which an alternative theory of acting could be founded” to substitute for “ancient doctrines of inspiration” grounded in pre-seventeenth century scholastic paradigms. In this context, Cochin’s comments imply that the architectural conditions of acting were believed to be important to the physiological function of the actor as well as of the spectator. See The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 112-5.

312 Ibid., 13.

169 pursues bodily comfort and stillness; he remarks that “on peut voir le spectacle sans tourner la tête” (on can see the show without turning the head), indicating that the body of the actor was the central object of theatrical viewing. Though intervisibility, the oft- noted dynamic by which theatregoers directed their gaze at each other as well as at the stage, was not wholly rejected by theatre architecture reformers in the second half of the century,313 architects including Cochin relegated it to a secondary concern, preferring instead to enforce an unencumbered and immediate view of the stage.

Cochin was overtly concerned, moreover, with conferring the benefits of this enhanced aural and visual encounter on the maximum number of spectators, and this concern is one of several warrants offered in his Projet d’une Salle de Spectacle for the three-part stage. The triple stage, besides enabling the representation of multiple locations as called for in plays like Sémiramis, multiplied the number of places frontally served by perspective décor:

Un autre avantage suit de cette triple scène: ceux qui sont sur les côtés à nos théâtres (& c’est presque tous) ne peuvent jamais voir qu’un côté de la décoration, & rien ne les dédommage de ce défaut de spectacle. Ici ceux qui sont sur les côtés (& c’est le petit nombre) ne voyent à la vérité qu’un des côtés de la grande scène; mais ils ont, pour ainsi dire, leur décoration particuliere, dans les petites scènes qui se présentent devant eux & qui satisfont leurs regards.314

(Another advantage follows from this triple stage: those on the sides of our theatres (and this is almost everyone) can never see but one side of the decoration, and nothing compensates them for this defect of spectacle. Here those on the sides (and this is the few) don’t see, in truth, but one side of the large stage, but they have, so to speak, their private decoration within the little stages that are presented before them, and that satisfy their gaze.)

313 Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, for example, rejected distracting embellishments of the proscenium arch in his Théâtre de Besançon, yet echoed the eighteenth-century commonplace that female spectators made for the best decorations in the salle, tacitly acknowledging the continued desire for intervisibility. See also BNF SPE. Rt 2518.

314 C.-N. Cochin, Projet d’une Salle, 17.

170 Considered alongside historiography that charts a French middle class that accumulated financial, intellectual and political clout as the Monarchy faltered, Cochin’s egalitarian rationale for the triple stage depicts a spectatorship in transition. Occupants, after all, paid dearly for their boxes and financed the King’s troupe; why should they not be presented with a décoration particuliere?

Cochin, however, engages in a delicate negotiation between the collective desire of an increasingly entitled public and the unified sovereign perspective that still served as the vital instrument of his employer, the King. The central perspective of his stage, he notes, is only slightly smaller than that of the current Comédie-Française, and the widened proscenium as a whole – which is to say, the three stages combined – confers a magnificent view on the back central loge, which is distinguished from its neighbors by a draped canopy visible in a reverse transverse section (fig. 3.13):

Il s’ensuit que les personnes placées au milieu dans la loge du Roi, c’est à dire, au point le plus avantageux, ne voyent plus rien qui détruise l’illusion, & n’apperçoivent les spectateurs qu’autant qu’ils le veulent, & en détournant leurs regards.315

(It follows that those placed in the center in the King’s box, which is to say, at the most advantageous point, no longer see anything that destroys the illusion, and perceive the spectators only as much as they want to, and by diverting their gaze.)

Thus from the king’s box, the spectatorial view is engulfed by the stage, rather than encroached upon by the undulating halo of other spectators. The democratization of perspective, as of 1765, must still submit, therefore, to the view of the King, and the public is not yet fully distributed in a homogenous array. Cochin strikes a diplomatic note in justifying his salle design: “On ne peut desconvenir qu’il est impossible de

315 Ibid.

171 construire un théâtre enfermé, couvert, & capable de contenir le même nombre de spectateurs qu’il en tient dans les nôtres, où tout le monde soit également bien placé”316

(One cannot deny that it is impossible to construct a closed, covered theatre able to contain the number of spectators housed by ours, where everyone is equally well placed).

The balance between the central, unified vantage of the loge du Roi, and the sweeping amphitheatre is mirrored by the tripartite stage: Cochin argues that this segmentation by columnar supports still preserves the Aristotlean unity of place since each of the three stages “auroient pour réunion la partie avancée du théâtre”317 (have, as a juncture, the protruding part of the stage).

The spectatorial view deployed in Cochin’s Projet, moreover, discloses the extent to which theatre architecture theory had come to assimilate the object-mindedness that permeated French dramatic theory after Dubos’ 1719 Réflexions. Cochin’s observation that the view from the central loge only encompasses the house “en detournant leurs regards,” demonstrates that the coup d’œil generated by his structure fixated primarily on the stage rather than sweeping over the whole assembly. What is more, the epistemologically valent language of the stage object that was our concern in chapter one is found within Cochin’s essay. Louis’ engraver’s stage is populated with temples, palaces and tombs, which are construed, not as loci or lieux, but as “objets distincts;” his explication of the decorative benefits of the triple stage notes that “le Décorateur auroit la liberté d’y répandre [la] quantité d’objets qui traverseroient son théâtre, donneroient lieu

à des effets pittoresques & vrais, & en banniroient cette uniformité ennuyeuse à laquelle

316 Ibid., 14.

317 Ibid., 18.

172 il est assujetti” (the decorator would have the freedom there to expand [the] number of objects that would traverse his stage, would give allow for picturesque and true effects, and would banish the tedious uniformity to which he is subject).318

Such a Locke-inflected formulation offers a stark contrast with earlier architectural descriptions of stage function. Gilles Oppenord’s unrealized 1734 plans for a Théâtre Lyrique, for example, are devoid of the language of stage objects. Oppenord labels one profound stage a “Theatre pour les Scenes Et Spectacles Ou on pourra representer touttes sortes des sujets tels tels [sic] vastes qu’ils puissent être” (Stage for the scenes and spectacles where one will be able to represent all sorts of subjects as vast as they can be), and another “Theatre, qui a 18 toises de profondeur sur 58 pied de largeur, par consequent suceptible des Spectacles les plus magnifique tels vaste qu’ils puissent

Estre”319 (Stage, which is 114.8 feet deep by 61.8 feet wide, consequently sufficient for the most magnificent spectacles, as vast as they can be). The theatrical objects manifest in Diderot’s theory had, by 1765, infiltrated the domain of theatre architecture. Cochin employs the terms of a post-Dubosian aesthetics; his desire to accommodate the ears and eyes of a wider swath of the audience is welded to a formulation of aesthetic function for which the distinction between the objects of the world and those of theatrical representation is one of degree, but not of category.

* * *

318 Ibid., 21.

319 Gilles Oppenord’s plans reside at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts: EBA O 1746, 01-19. See reproductions in Emmanuelle Brugerolles, François Boucher et l’art rocaille dans les collections de l’École des beaux arts (Paris: ENSdBA, 2003), 302-17.

173

Cochin’s Projet was followed in 1766 by the publication of an opera house design and accompanying essays penned by the Chevalier de Chaumont entitled Véritable construction d’un théâtre d’Opera, à l’usage de France, Suivant les principes des

Constructeurs Italiens, avec Toutes les Mesures & Proportions relatives à la Voix, expliquée Par des Regles de Géométrie, & des Raisonnements Physiques; Secret très- important, & qu’on découvre au Public. Chaumont, while sharing Cochin’s belief that the propagation of sight and sound is the primary function of a theatre building and carrying forward the practice of dealing separately with the interior and exterior of theatre buildings, rejects the elliptical forms popular among the King’s architects. His salle, composed of a protruding forestage and joined arc segments of loges meeting at an angle in the middle (fig. 3.14), is designed in part to draw the audience away from the notorious back corners of the house. Besides this unique auditorium shape, Chaumont’s treatise is distinguished by a relative disregard of Italian models, a vigorous acoustical analysis, and an explicit recourse to scientific knowledge in service of theatre architecture’s practical demands.

Chaumont does not invoke “rules of geometry and physical reasoning” in his title idly. He states that “Il est très-certain qu’il faut être plus Physicien qu’Architecte, pour construire l’interieur d’une Salle d’Opéra, & qu’il faut connoître toutes les propriétés de l’air & de la voix”320 (It is quite certain that one must be more a physicist than an architect in order to build the interior of an opera house, and that one must understand all of the properties of air and of the voice). His theatre, moreover, is formed to exploit the

320 Chevalier de Chaumont, Véritable construction d’un théâtre d’Opera (Paris: Chez de Lormel, 1766), 8.

174 tenets of a coherent—if implicit and empirically unsupported—theory of acoustics, which held that the free circulation of a large volume of air within a walled-off space served to amplify sounds.321 Chaumont, accordingly, corrects four acoustic faults he observes in

French theatres: the air-trapping space below the first ring of loges; the porous separation of stage and loges; the excessive height of each ring of loges; finally, the stacking of loges in retreat, as in the case of Soufflot’s Lyon design.

As a part of the development of theatre architecture theory in late eighteenth- century France, Chaumont’s opera house design signals the first self-conscious application of scientific knowledge in the reform movement. Chaumont emphasizes the importance of physics to enhancing the auditory function of theatre. He reinforces the presumption that theatre architecture reform ought not be confined to the traditional domains of knowledge exploited by academic architecture. In addition to classical and modern architectural models, and an intensifying attention to spectatorial function,322 architects were pressed to incorporate developments in experimental physics. According to Chaumont,

L’architect a beau tenir le premier rang par son savoir & ses talens; s’il n’est pas Physicien, & qu’il veuille donner tout à son génie constructeur, il fera de très-

321 Chaumont compares the proper shape of a theatre building to that of a cornet, or ear horn, and argues, counterintuitively, that a large stage space in fact promotes good acoustics if the circulation of air between the stage and the house is restricted to the proscenium opening. Of the immense stage of the Salle des Machines at Tuileries, he writes: “hors je soutiens que plus il y aura d’espace sur les derrieres, plus il y a d’air; & que cet air circulant, & se rassemblant au centre, ne peut qu’avoir son issue par l’ouverture du rideau, & porter la voix dans toute la Salle (12)” (Also I maintain that the more space there is in back of the stage, the more air there is, and that this air, circulating and reassembling in the center, cannot escape but through the curtain opening and carry the voix throughout the house).

322 Anthony Vidler observes of late eighteenth-century French architecture that “the traditional sense of a building that embodied “beauty” in its proportions and its three-dimensional geometries was gradually subordinated to the idea of a geometrical order that followed the dictates of social or environmental needs.” The increasing importance of spectatorship, and its constinuent practices and techniques, therefore, conforms with a wider architectural trend toward utility and pragmatism. See The Writing of the Walls (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), 3.

175 belles façades, ornera le tout dans un grand goût, hasardera des choses nouvelles, & de son invention, pour l’intérieur d’une Salle; mais ses proportions & mesures ne seront point relatives à la voix & à la commodité du Public, & par-là manquera du principal, malgré la beauté & la richesse de la Décoration […].323

(The architect has first class knowledge and talents in vain; if he is not a physicist, and if he would give all to his genius as a builder, he will create very beautiful façades, will ornament the whole in great taste, and will venture new things of his own invention for the interior of a theatre house. But his proportions and measures will not be related to the voice, nor to accomodating the public, and in this will lack the most important thing, despite the beauty and richness of the decoration.)

Vitruvius’ exhortation that architects be polymaths was implicitly endorsed by architects in the eighteenth century,324 but Chaumont emphasizes the special importance of physics to theatre architecture. In so doing he both urges wresting theatre architecture from academic norms and forecasts the approach of Pierre Patte, who would later cite the physics experiments of Abbé Nollet and apply the optical branch of physics to spectatorial function. The importance of physics to theatre architecture is, for Chaumont, limited to the propagation of sound through air, but, as I will explore in a later section of this chapter, the link between physical knowledge and spectatorship was soon expanded into the visual aspect of spectatorship.

French theatre architecture reform emerged in a series of published articles, letters and treatises that appeared with increasing frequency in the two decades after Voltaire’s

Sémiramis. By the end of the 1760s public interest in new theatre buildings had also seeped into French visual culture, and one can trace the development of the architectural understanding of spectatorial function through hand drawn and engraved designs that

323 Chaumont, ibid., 18.

324 Blondel’s article under the heading “Architecte” in the Encyclopédie, for example, states that architects must be versed in mathematics and perspective, but also literature and history (1:617). See also Vitruvius, 10 Books on Architecture. ed. Ingrid D. Rowland and Thomas Noble Howe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 5-13.

176 circulated during this time.325 The 1768 Prix de Rome for theatre designs and the sense that Soufflot, who was overburdened with the construction of the Sainte-Geneviève church (today’s Pantheon) was not likely to be granted the project for the new Comédie-

Française, may have catalyzed the production and circulation of designs.326 Architects and amateurs produced designs during the late 1760s that reflected a variety of competing solutions to the problems of theatre architecture, and drew, to varying degrees, upon

French and Italian templates. In this climate of heightened architectural production, a widening circle of architects and opinionated spectators alike sought out images of ancient and modern theatres and inspired new projects.

In 1764, G.M. Dumont (1720-1791), who had traveled in Italy with Soufflot and studied theatre architecture with Potain, commenced to publish a series of engraved images of theatre architecture, including renderings of Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico,

Alfieri’s theatre at Turin, Soufflot’s Lyon project, and designs by D’Orbay, Moreau,

Poirot fils, Gabriel, and Dumont himself.327 The duration of Dumont’s attention to theatre architecture, and the fact that his engravings were repeatedly promoted in the

Mercure de France, attests to the public appetite for architectural images of theatre buildings. Dumont produced not only plan, section and elevation drawings for what were

325 Several examples of variously attributed theatre designs reside in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des Estampes (Va 263), the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, and at the Musée Carnavalet.

326 Rabreau, Le Théâtre et l’embellissement des villes, 149; Von Kalnein, 169-71.

327 Dumont’s engravings were published in an undetermined number of installments that began in 1763 or 1764. A complete edition was published in 1774. Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont, Parallèle de Plans des Plus Belles Salles de Spectacles d’Italie et de France, Avec des Détails de Machines Théâtrales (Paris: Chez l’auteur, rue des Arcis, 1774). Reprinted (Bronx, New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1968). For Dumont’s affiliation with Soufflot and Potain, see Michel Gallet, Les Architectes Parisiens du XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: Mengès, 1995), 202-203. See also Rabreau, Le Théâtre et l’embellissement des villes, 127.

177 in his estimation “tous les plus beaux théâtres de l’Europe”328 (all the most beautiful theatres in Europe), but also renderings of scenery for different types of productions, details of elaborate stage machinery, and, in 1773, an illustration of the fire suppression system of the Comédie-Italien.329 Taken as a whole, Dumont’s engravings also show the form in which theatre architecture, in its most technical and pedestrian aspects, had seized public interest at the end of the 1760s. Plans, elevations, side and transverse sections, and images of joinery and truss construction—traditionally instruments of the architect and builder—mingle with scenic mockups, cityscapes, and sections in which stages are decorated and populated with actors (fig. 3.15). The Parallèle de Plans disseminated current architectural knowledge to a public that wanted to participate in the overhaul of Paris’ theatres. Enlightened amateurs like Diderot, Fréron, and the Chevalier de Chaumont had directed the reformist discourse in such a way that foregrounded spectatorial concerns; now theatre architecture itself was the object of the public critical and spectatorial gaze.

No image better emblemizes this publicizing of the theatre architect’s métier than

Dumont’s “Vue Perspective de la Méchanique, Et Construction d’un Interieur de

Théâtre” (fig. 3.16). The engraving, in much the same explanatory style as plates from the Encyclopédie, shows a perspective scene of theatre engineers assembling the structural elements and scenery of a denuded stage interior from the vantage point of the auditorium. As in Cochin’s Projet d’une Salle de Spectacle, the stage structure is devoid of a visible exterior; the interior of the building—the domain of spectatorial function—is

328 Mercure de France, July 1771, v. 1, 178.

329 Mercure de France, January 1773, v. 1, 164, and April, 1773, v. 1, 192.

178 separated from the whole. If, as Daniel Brewer observes of similar plates in the

Encyclopédie, this image amounts to “a visual counterpart to the utilitarian rationalism, the sensationist philosophy, and the experimental method that Diderot proposes in his

1753 Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature,”330 then Dumont’s naked scène unifies, in one composition, the priority of spectatorial vantage and the visual protocols of mid- century French Enlightenment knowledge production.

Other architectural publications expanded the visual component of the push to renovate French theatres in the years after the 1763 Paris Opera fire. The seventh volume of Jean-François de Neufforge’s Recueil élémentaire d’architecture, published in 1767, included a series of private building designs with built-in theatres of various sizes and styles.331 In addition to these plan drawings, Neufforge included in his Recueil a section of “Modéles de plusieurs Plans et Decorations à l’usage des Salles de Spectacles,” including plan, side section and transverse section drawings designed to show tasteful interior decorations for salle interiors. The preponderance of interior views among

Neufforge’s plates dedicated to theatre further manifests an architectural preoccupation with the spectatorial – as opposed to the urban or holistic – treatment of theatre buildings that pervaded the 1760s.

Architects not only came to dwell on the interior proportions and decorations of theatre halls, but also began to mix, and in some cases combine, presentations of theatre designs with imagined scenic decorations. Charles de Wailly presented projected images

330 Daniel Brewer, “The Work of the Image: The Plates of the Encyclopédie” Stanford French Review 8: 2- 3 (Fall 1984), 237. Anthony Vidler moreover both compares the spare, rectilinear depictions of the métiers plates in the Encyclopédie to “a series of tableaux vivants” and links them to a materialist, Locke indebted tactic of sharing knowledge. See The Writing of the Walls, 24-8.

331 Jean-François de Neufforge, Recueil élémentaire d’architecture, vol. 7 (Paris: Chez l’Auteur rue St. Jacques ou Chariot d’Or, 1767) BNF EST. H.a 29 e.

179 of his (and Peyre’s) design for the new Comédie-Française alongside drawings of scenic decorations in the 1771 Salon.332 It has been noted that Potain inserted a decoration for

Sémiramis in his designs for a Salle de Spectacle; Cochin, Charles de Wailly, and Claude

Nicolas Ledoux similarly embellished transverse sections of theatre projects in this manner. The common practice of embedding scenery and figures of actors and spectators in architectural designs combined the lived space of the theatrical spectator with the conceived space of the architect, and graphically manifests the ongoing convergence of spectatorial demands and architectural priorities.333 The coup d’œil of the spectator, as rendered by architects, represented an evolving, practical theatrical vision that upstaged the austere geometrical proportions that had traditionally ordered architectural bodies. In my fourth chapter, I will elaborate on the shifting role of geometry in late eighteenth- century theatre plans; for now it suffices to note that visual renderings of theatre projects after the 1763 Paris Opera Fire manifested a thorough architectural appropriation of a properly spectatorial, stage-oriented vision.

The imagined stage decorations that appear in the transverse sections of these architects, of course, do not necessarily correspond in any way to what audience would eventually see in completed theatre projects, and yet there is reason to believe that the architectural imagination bled over into a wider spectatorial optique du théâtre. Charles

332 Rabreau, Le Théâtre et l’embellissement des villes, 187, 356.

333 Henri Lefebvre argues that theatre, in combining “fictitious and real counterparts,” gives rise to a “third space” that is “no longer either scenic or public.” This theatrical space, moreover, combines scenic representations of space, which Lefebvre elsewhere identifies with the geometer and the architect, with “representational space, mediated yet directly experienced, which infuses the work and the moment.” I contend that such depictions of scenic and lived space within architectural plans constitute a representation of this “third space” that entails both a representation of space and a representational space. See The Production of Space (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 188. The translation of the seventeenth-century absolute distinction between the world of fact and extra-factual theatrical domains into a visually dominated mode of representation is suggested by use of different shading or color palattes for the scenographic regions of architectural drawings.

180 de Wailly, as well as Gabrielle Dumont, designed stage sets meant to be executed, rather than illustrations of architectural function. Some of De Wailly’s designs remain in the

Bibliothèque Nationale. There emerged, moreover, a peculiar hybrid of architectural projection and spectatorial vantage in the early nineteenth-century, that suggests that a bridge between these two formations of visual culture was in the process of forming.

Alexis Donnet and Orgiazzi’s Architectonographie des Théâtres, published initially in

1821, showcases plan and section drawings for dozens of major Parisian theatres, along with decriptions and perspective images from particular spectatorial viewpoints.334 This remarkable document illustrates a thoroughly integrated architectural and spectatorial popular vision that emerged in the Napoleanic era.

III. The Geometry of Sense and the Late Phase of French Theatre Architecture

Reform

At the end of the 1760s, exponents of theatre architecture reform depicted the spectator as the perpetrator of a momentary act of sensory perception, and placed this act at the center of their arguments. This theoretical development both conformed with a broader trend in French architecture that favored practical, functional designs as instruments of social reform, and altered the terms of the debate over what was considered to be the best shape for theatrical auditoria. In his Voyage d’Italie Cochin had identified the wide ellipse (of Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico) and the narrow ellipse (of

Alfieri’s Theatre at Turin) as the two most promising theatre building arrangements; by

334 Alexis Donnet and Orgiazzi, Architectonographie des Théâtres, ou Parallèle Historique et Critique de ces Édifices, Considerés sous le rapport de l’Architecture et de la décoration (Paris: Chez L. Mathias, 1837).

181 the time Marigny assigned the design of the new Comédie-Française jointly to Charles

De Wailly and Marie Joseph Peyre in 1767, the wide ellipse had been supplanted by the circle. 335 Appeals to Palladio, the paragon of harmonic proportion, were less salient for the architectural culture of late neo-classicism, which sought to recover architecture’s primordial, functional causes. Rather than debating which canonical model offered the best template for an overhauled French theatre architecture, theorists now bolstered their defenses of circular or oblong theatres by arguing that they were favorably disposed to an object-oriented spectatorial function that operated according to the mechanics of sense perception. Architectural and spectatorial concerns regarding theatre design were all but conflated at the end of the decade.

The major works of theatre architecture theory that appeared in 1768 and 1782 set out to fully develop the notion of the spectator’s function within a theatre building, and tended to cast the spectatorial act as a physiological function in order to translate its peculiarities into forms that could be applied to architectural solutions. The anonymously authored Exposition des Principes qu’on doit suivre dans l’ordonnance des théâtres modernes (1769) and Pierre Patte’s Essai sur l’architecture théâtrale (1782), along with shorter pieces by Charles De Wailly and J.F. Blondel, synthesized many of the ideas that circulated during the early phase of the reform movement, and developed them with reference to current physical science. These writers concurred that the acoustical and optical function of the salle de spectacle held the key to its proper form, and accordingly

335 Its inconvenient bulk and radical departure from the narrow volume of habitual French use in part account for the demise of Potain’s wide ellipse plan. Cochin himself admitted that his updated version of Palladio’s theatre would not be fit for Paris, noting that “il peut y avoir des loix de convenance relatives à cette Capitale, auxquelles on ne s’est point assujetti” (“there may be laws of acceptable use belonging to this capital which one has not observed”). Projet d’une Salle de Spectacle, 2.

182 treated spectatorship as an anatamo-mechanical function. By the 1780s, architects held that acoustical and optical phenomena discovered by experimental physics could rationally mold an enlightened theatrical architectonics.

Before turning to the theoretical texts in detail, it must be noted that the developments in theatre architecture theory outlined above were quickly translated into prominent architectural projects. Both the ascendency of the circular auditorium plan and the increasing centrality of spectatorial function are evident, for example, in documents and plans produced by De Wailly as part of his work on the Comédie-Française. Though the Marquis de Marigny had asked Soufflot for an oval design for this project in 1763, in

1769 Marigny approved a set of drawings from De Wailly and Peyre with a perfectly circular auditorium.336 In a manuscript describing the interior of this design, De Wailly repeats the complaint most commonly leveled against French theatre architecture and proposes the circle as a solution:

La trop grande profondeur de nos Salles de Spectacle est leur principal defaut; les loges du fonds qui sont les plus favorables pour decouvrir le jeu des acteurs, et jouir de l’éffet des decorations se trouvent trop eloignées pour bien voir et bien entendre: il faut la plus grande aplication [sic] de la part du Spectateur, et cette application diminüe son plaisir. La forme ovale ronde qu’on se propose de donner à la nouvelle Salle anéantira cet inconvenient.337

(The too-great depth of our theatre halls is their principle defect; the loges in the back that are the most favorable for discovering the performance of the actor, and that enjoy the effect of the decorations are too distant to see and hear well. They demand the greatest effort on the part of the spectator, and this effort diminishes his or her pleasure. The oval round form that we propose to give to the new theatre will obliterate this inconvenience.)

336 Designs for this project bearing Marigny’s signature are in the French National Archives. AN O1 846, #41.

337 Charles De Wailly, “Mémoire sur le Projet d’une nouvelle Salle à construire pour la Comédie- Française” BNF MNS. NAF 2479/416. Daniel Rabreau asserts that this manuscript was written in 1768.

183 The word ovale, crossed out by the author, may be read as a simple error, but there is reason to believe that the debate over the fundamental shape of the auditorium had consolidated around these two shapes among architects within and outside of the

Bâtiments du Roi. Though De Wailly maintained that “il n’est personne qui ne sente combien la forme ronde est preferable à touttes les autres” (there is no one who doesn’t feel how preferable the round form is to all others), a design with a slightly oval auditorium is found among the early designs of the new Comédie-Française, and the final version of the building contained an oval salle to accommodate a larger number of spectators.

De Wailly goes on to argue for the circular salle expressly in terms of its enhancement of the spectatorial experience: “c’est sans contredit la plus belle, la plus reguliere, elle produit un effet agréable à l’œil; elle n’offre point des angles toujours nuisibles à la repercution des sons; elle procure enfin au Public le double avantage de mieux voir et de mieux entendre”338 (it is beyond dispute the most beautiful, the most regular; it produces an agreeable effect on the eye; it offers none of the angles always detrimental to the repercussion of sounds; finally, it grants the public the double advantage of seeing and hearing better). The circle, then, is recommended not so much by the qualities of balance and equipoise attributed to it by Renaissance adherents to a

“mathematical definition of beauty”339 as by the empirical benefits it promises a sensing spectator.340 It is germane to note, however, that De Wailly wholly submits

338 Ibid.

339 Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (Great Britain: Academy Editions, 1998), 39.

340 This document by no means reflects a consensus among architects concerning the best form to give the inside of a theatre. Architects continued to produce designs that featured semi-circular, elliptical and bell-

184 architectonics to a sensory notion of spectatorship. The architect of the Odéon restricts his analysis of theatre hall form to the encounter between spectators and the “differens objets” that populate his triple stage. If the demands of a universal, sensing spectator constituted a growing preoccupation for reformers before 1765, at the end of the decade they congealed into a dogma. De Wailly’s reduction of theatre design to the maximization of audio-visual clarity was not atypical; it rather echoed theoretical texts published during the early phases of his work on new national theatre.

The author of the 1769 Exposition des principes qu’on doit suivre dans l’ordonnance des théâtres modernes attempts to comprehensively describe the principles that govern theatre design, synthesizing much of what had been previously published in shorter formats, and pushing the physical analysis of theatrical interiors to a new level of reasoning. The author of the text, variously identified as the Chevalier de Chaumont and

G.M. Monginot,341 explains that, though he is not an architect, he has been inspired by the work of other erudite amateurs and informed by his correspondance with “les plus célebres architectes” (the most celebrated architects).342 The author sets out to surmount the obstacles of architectural habit and prejudice, and urges replacing the “vicieuse”

(defective) playhouses of France with “des formes plus régulieres & plus commodes que celles qu’on a suivies” (forms more regular and accomodating than those we’ve shaped auditoria through the 1780s. The circular auditorium, however, garnered royal sanction at the end of the 1760s, was eventually adopted by Victor Louis for his Bordeaux and Paris theatre designs, and thus can be argued to found a uniquely French theatre architectural style that propagated well into the nineteenth century.

341 Though F.C Green attributes this text to the Chevalier de Chaumont, this is unlikely given that the author of the Exposition des principes argues against vertically stacked rings of loges like those proposed in Chaumont’s 1766 Veritable Construction d’un théâtre d’opera. See F.C. Green, “Charles-Nicolas Cochin and Le Chevalier de Chaumont: Two Eighteenth-Century Reformers in Playhouse Design” French Studies v. 17 (April, 1963) no. 2, 148-54.

342 Anonymous, Exposition des Principes, iii-iv.

185 followed), echoing De Wailly’s call for regular geometry.343 As in De Wailly’s case, furthermore, the regularity of forms is justified by invoking the spectator’s visual experience, rather than by reference to intrinsic geometrical qualities.

The Exposition des Principes sets out four chief goals that must guide the theatre architect, the sum of which depends upon a theatrical spectator reduced to a set of sensory capabilities and predilections: 1) the spectator must hear the actor distinctly from everywhere in the house except the “places de souffrance;” 2) the spectator must clearly see the stage; 3) the part that appears to the spectators, together with the fixed elements of the stage, must offer an ensemble that presents an agreeable perspective, and that has an air of grandeur and good decoration; 4) the architect must observe proprieties relative to customs and to climate.344 Visual concerns constitute two of the four principles, and the first, deprived of a settled theory of architectural acoustics, competes weakly with vision in determining the interior shape of the theatre.

Acoustics, as explained by the author of the Exposition des Principes, was an inexact science, where sound consists of “un trémoussement excité dans l’air, ou un autre milieu quelconque de ceux qui composent notre atmosphere” (a tremor excited in the air, or some other medium among those that compose our atmosphere), and in which rays of sound were thought to amplify within enclosed spaces by way of repercussion, reflection or circulation.345 Consequently acoustical physics, while of tremendous acknowledged importance to a playhouse, suggested only that architects avoid anything that would

343 Ibid., xiv.

344 Ibid., 12-3.

345 Ibid., 13-5.

186 obstruct the direct force of sound “rays,” reinforce as much of the salle as possible with hard, sonorous materials to redirect sound toward the center of the room, reduce sound absorbing material to a minimum, and give the auditorium “la figure plus favorable à la circulation, à la direction de ces sons sur les spectateurs” (the figure most favorable to the circulation, to the direction of these sounds over the spectators), whatever that figure might be.346 It was difficult, in other words, to sustain arguments for either a round or oblong salle on the basis of acoustical science.347

Having taken up the Chevalier de Chaumont’s call to be more a physicist than an architect in theatre design, the author of the Exposition des Principes turns to optics:

Les principes de l’optique nous prescrivent, comme les regles de l’acoustique, la situation des spectateurs. Les objets qui sont en représentation doivent être vus distinctement & commodement; ceux qui sont placés sur le théâtre, doivent former aux yeux du spectateur un grand tableau, semblable à celui qu’offrirait une toile placée à l’ouverture, comme celle qui sert de rideau, sur laquelle seraient peints les mêmes objets qu’offre la scene, 348 situés de la même maniere.

(The principles of optics prescribe for us, like the rules of acoustics, the arrangement of the spectators. The objects that are represented should be viewed distinctly and comfortably; those placed on the stage ought to form, for the eyes of the spectator, a grand tableau, similar to that which would be offered by a canvas placed over the opening, in the manner of a curtain, on which the same objects given in the scene would be painted, situated in the same manner.)

The vanishing point, the author explains, must be fixed at a height of 2.67 feet (2.5 pieds) above the feet of the actor, and, unlike painted perspectives, on center—in order to avoid imposing excessive distortions on the public. From this point, the architect is instructed to draw four lines—a pair that pass over the head and under the feet of the centrally- placed actor, and two that touch the inside edges of the proscenium opening—and from

346 Ibid., 18.

347 The author later abbreviates his acoustical demands to simply “des surfaces de renvoi pour les sons” (reflective surfaces for the sounds), further implying that acoustics did not specifically recommend one curves auditorium shape over another (62).

348 Ibid., 19.

187 these four lines construct a conoid that limits the location of the spectators: “c’est dans l’espace de ce conoïde que doivent être renfermés tous les rayons visuels des spectateurs”

(it is within the space of this conoid that all the visual rays of the spectators should be enclosed). The ideal playhouse interior of the Exposition des Principes, then, is primarily determined by a study of sightlines, and a “champ libre” (clear field) in the “espace entre l’oeil du spectateur & la pointe du conoïde”349 (space between the eye of the spectator and the point of the conoid). The central ideal perspective that organized the dominant seventeenth-century mode of theatre architecture is challenged here, but not entirely dissolved. Like Cochin, the author strikes an egalitarian but diplomatic note, stating that,

“on voit qu’il y a un point de vue principal, joint à une infinité de perspectives accessoires”350 (we see that there is a central vanishing point, joined to an infinity of ancillary perspectives).

Besides showing the ongoing infiltration of theatre architecture by the acoustical and optical branches of physics, the Exposition des Principes also integrates the Lockean epistemological structure of exterior objects and sense impressions. The author explains that the boundaries of his conoid are set to encompass the body of the actor, since “le personnage est en effet l’objet principal dans une représentation théâtrale”351 (the character is actually the principal object in a theatrical representation). The excessive distance between the stage and outer reaches of ancient Greek auditoria, moreover, are critiqued on the grounds that “les objets placés sur le théâtre paraissant petits, les caracteres des passions dans les personnages étaient par conséquent trop peu sensibles

349 Ibid., 21-2.

350 Ibid., 23.

351 Ibid., 22.

188 pour faire une impression bien marquée”352 (the objects placed on stage seeming small; the qualities of the passions in the characters were consequently not discernible enough to make a strongly felt impression). In this work the spatial arrangement of spectators is determined by degrees of distance from the emotive object of the actor and, and the limits of the frontal gaze, which will not tolerate an angle too high or too off-center. In appropriating acoustical and optical physics, theatre architecture had rationalized the sense-founded aesthetic of tableau, and sanctioned the primacy of visual sense in theatre theory.

The author of the Exposition des Principes claims that his principles for the interior shape of a theatre “sont généralement reçus” (are generally accepted). Indeed, there is reason to believe that by the 1770s theatre architecture reform in France had settled into a loose consensus on the need for architectural practice to cultivate a stable, unimpeded sensory encounter with the stage. Both the Exposition des Principes, authored by a confessed amateur, and J.F. Blondel’s Cours d’Architecture, whose author was the “leading champion of the classical tradition” and a revered professor at the

Academy of Architecture, concurred on the best shapes of theatrical interiors and concentrated heavily on the visual aspect of spectatorship.353 Both authors advocate for either circular or elliptical theatrical salles since these forms capture the benefits of propagating both sound and vision, and Blondel similarly portrays the changes to

352 Ibid., 63.

353 Wend Von Kalnein, Architecture in France in the Eighteenth Century, 135.

189 theatrical interiors he proposes as the subject of agreement among “le plus grand nombre des hommes de goût” (the majority of men of taste).354

Blondel’s practical suggestions, moreover, align with the Exposition des

Principes in pressing, at the exclusion of other concerns, for the enhancement of the aural and visual aspects of spectatorial experience. Blondel advocates for changes to improve theatre spectatorship not just through acoustics, but indirectly through impositions made on spectators and performers. In addition to banishing sound-diminishing right angles from the salle, he proposes enlarging its diameter, moving the orchestra to the sides of the house, and seating the parterre section to “procurer à nos Spectacles cette tranquillité, dont peut-être ils ne jouiront jamais qu’imparfaitement sans ces précautions”355 (procure for our shows a tranquility that they may only ever imperfectly enjoy without these precautions). These suggestions, warranted by their improvement of the sensory encounter with the stage in general, are supplemented by other, explicitly visual enhancements. Blondel also endorses the removal of spectators from the stage, and, breaching the line between architecture and scenography, argues for removing lights from the vicinity of the proscenium arch and for drawing scenic decorations into comformity with the rules of good architecture. Complaints about candle vapors and the function of stage machinery indicate an architectural vision that fully accommodates the vantage of the spectator, and that extends architectural practice into the plastic elements of theatrical representation itself.

354 Anonymous, Exposition des Principes, 34, 54; J.F. Blondel, Cours d’Architecture ou Traité de la Décoration, Distributions & Construction des Bâtiments, Tome Second (Paris: Chez Desaint, rue du Foin- S.-Jacques, 1771), 277.

355 Blondel, ibid.

190 The theatre section of Blondel’s authoritative Cours d’Architecture depicts the development of the impulse to renovate France’s theatre buildings within the academic establishment from a holistic architectural critique, to a vision-centric reform agenda that merged architectural concerns with a notion of spectatorial function. While the exterior of the theatre building was not ignored by architectural professionals like Blondel and De

Wailly, its features were considered separate from the demands of the interior, which were directly linked to the spectator’s sensory encounter with the stage and thus were

“plus essentiel” (more essential) and woefully neglected.356 Blondel, who penned the

“architecture” article for the Encyclopédie and nearly 500 others, supported the philosophes’ campaign to seat the parterre, and his opinions on theatre, by couching the priorities of amateurs and enlightened spectators within a technical architectural lexicon, demonstrate the cohesiveness of the reform movement after 1770. What is more, the final phase of the theatre architecture reform movement in France, which witnessed the utilization of optics as a fund of geometric forms, was largely propelled by Blondel’s assistant, the architect Pierre Patte, and by Blondel’s acolyte, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux.

* * *

Pierre Patte’s 1782 Essai sur l’architecture théâtrale, ou d’Ordonnance la plus avantageuse à une Salle de Spectacles, relativement aux principes de l’Optique & de l’Acoustique marks the theoretical culmination of French theatre architecture reform in

356 Blondel, ibid., 265.

191 the eighteenth century.357 The essay includes analyses of a dozen European theatres— including Victor Louis’ 1780 Théâtre de Bordeaux—and an elaborate defense of the long elliptical salle arrangement. Patte’s essay is remarkable for developing the application of acoustics and optics first proposed in the late 1760s into an overt appropriation of geometrical forms native to optics. Patte’s defining theoretical gesture is to ground the borrowing of optical and acoustical geometry in dramatic theory. According to the architect, the goal (but) of theatre is to “réussir, soit à émouvoir le cœur en excitant la terreur & la pitié, soit à amuser l’esprit par la peinture des ridicules, à dessein de les corriger” (succeed, whether in moving the heart by exciting terror and pity, or in amusing the mind by depicting foibles, with the aim to correct them), and both the tragic and comic result are attained by “charmer à la fois les yeux & les oreilles”358 (charming the eyes and the ears at once). This commonplace of eighteenth-century dramatic theory, however, is used to warrant a surprising architectural conclusion:

N’est-il pas, en un mot, de mettre en oeuvre les ressorts les plus propres à remuer l’ame, à faire illusion aux sens, & à enchanter les spectateurs? Or, ne voilà-t-il pas, par ce seul exposé, l’ordonnance d’un Théâtre en quelque sorte décidée? Les yeux & les oreilles étant destinés à étre les agens des plaisirs que nous nous y proposons, il résulte donc qu’il doit être disposé de façon à remplir essentiellement le double objet de bien voir & de bien entendre; que sa figure doit être un composé de formes optiques & acoustiques les plus propres à favoriser ces organes; que tout doit se rapporter à ces considérations fondamentales.359

(Is it not the goal, in a word, to activate the springs most proper to move the soul, to deceive the senses, and to enchant the spectators? So, is it not apparent, by this observation alone, that the arrangement of a theatre is some sense determined? The eyes and the ears being the agents of the pleasures we seek

357 Izenour calls Patte “the principal French essayist of the eighteenth century on the subject of theatre design.” Theater Design, 57.

358 Pierre Patte, Essai sur l’architecture théâtrale, ou de l’ordonnance la plus avantageuse à une Salle de Spectacles, relativement aux principes de l’Optique & de l’Acoustique (Paris: Chez Moutard, 1782), 2-3.

359 Ibid., 3.

192 there, it should therefore be arranged in such a manner as to essentially fulfill the double objective of seeing and hearing well, that its figure should be a composite of the optical and acoustical forms most proper to favor these organs, and that everything should be in accordance with these fundamental considerations.)

Patte was not the first writer to link the study of optics and acoustics to the fundamentals of theatre architecture, but his application of the mechanical dimension of sense differs significantly from that of the Exposition des Principes. The latter treatise interposes painterly perspective to mediate between optics and theatre design,360 while Patte directly fuses the physics of light and sound to architectural practice.

For Patte, the prevailing materialist understanding of the world as elaborate mechanism supports the direct application of circular and elliptical “formes optiques & acoustiques.” The demands of acoustics, as understood by Patte, are met by an appreciation of divine natural geometry:

C’est une regle constante que rien n’agit quarrément dans la nature, & que tout paroît se mouvoir, tourner ou graviter, soit circulairement, soit elliptiquement, soit suivant de certaines courbes autour de quelques centres. Dieu, a-t-on dit, n’a fait que géometriser en créant l’Univers: le son conséquemment doit être aussi asservi à l’une de ces déterminations.361

(It is a constant rule that nothing is rectagular in nature, and that everything appears to move, turn or gravitate, either circularly, elliptically, or following certain curves around some center. God, they say, merely geometrized in creating the Universe: sound, consequently, should also be served by one of these determinations.)

This predilection for circular and elliptical shapes was based more on a metaphysical judgment than on empirical studies of acoustics. Though Patte cites the Abbé Nollet’s

Leçons de Physique expérimentale in his description of the material properties of air as a

360 The author of the Exposition des Principes deploys optics through analysis of perspective, and uses the two terms interchangeably. While the the “principes de l’optique” are compared to the “regles de l’acoustique” (18) early in the treatise, in the concluding summary, these terms are refered to as the “principes de l’acoustique [et] de la perspective” (113).

361 Patte, 13.

193 conductive medium, his architectural acoustics are vague and “disarmingly naïve” in the judgment of contemporary architectural practice.362 Despite much overt reference to the laws of physics, Patte’s acoustical analysis is not fundamentally different from that of his predecessors, nor does it improve much upon Vitruvius.363 His endorsement of the ellipse relies upon the above blunt, quasi-Cartesian observation of the roundness in general of natural phenomena, and an application of optical geometry to acoustics typical of the late French essais.

For Patte, as for the author of the Exposition des Principes, acoustical “rays” propagate in straight lines and exhibit reflective properties not unlike those of light. The fundamental acoustical dynamics subscribed to by late eighteenth-century architects consisted of this borrowing from optics and the notion that sound “circulated” through the air as though pushed by the wind. Patte explains with palpable uncertainty how these two dynamics affect the propagation of sound by a directional source, like a cannon or the human voice:

[…] il paroît agir différement & avec une direction déterminée vers les corps environnans, soit en comprimant les molécules d’air contiguës, mises en mouvement à raison de leur élasticité ou divisibilité, soit en les penetrant comme font les rayons de la lumiere, soit en les repoussant ou déplaçant comme il arrive par l’effet du vent.364

([…] it seems to act differently and with a direction aimed at surrounding bodies, whether by compressing the contiguous air molecules put in motion because of their elasticity or divisibility, or by penetrating them as rays of light do, or by pushing and displacing them as it occurs with the effect of wind.)

This uncertainty concerning the dynamics of sound propagation seems to have magnified the importance of optical knowledge in the designs produced by theatre architects in the

362 Izenour, Theater Design, 57.

363 Izenour sums up Patte’s architectural acoustics as “sound is round and wood is good.” Ibid.

364 Patte, 12.

194 1780s. Patte’s elliptical theatre shape shows that he attaches importance to the constant sum of distances between the foci (foyers) of the ellipse and points along its edge (fig.

3.17). Patte explains that since sound rays emanating from the focus located on the avant-scene are collected at the other focus located near the back of the parquet, the ellipse creates a “colonne sonore,” or sonic column, that benefits a greater part of the house than would the acoustics of a circular or oval auditorium.365

Though this analysis was to be effectively rebutted by Carl Ferdinand Langhans in 1810,366 I am not as much concerned here with the technical errors in Patte’s architectural acoustics as I am with the fact that the essayist and his peers adopted the quasi-optical geometry of rays in determining the ideal shape of theatrical interiors. This practice was evidently common among theatre architects of the 1780s. Charles de

Wailly, in a 1785 manuscript entitled “Observations sur la forme le plus avantageuse aux

Salles de Spectacles,” uses the “natural” geometry of rays to justify his circular salle design.367 What is more, many theatre designs published after 1770, including projects by Andre Roubo, Patte, and Claude Nicolas Ledoux, include dotted sightline studies that align with the conoid described in the Exposition des Principes, and which indicate that

365 Ibid., 16-8.

366 Izenour, 65.

367 De Wailly adopts the language of rays, but hangs his justification largely on the “natural” formation of groups around an orator: “Des Exemples ont déja eprouvé ce que j’avance, mais la Nature avant tous l’avoit indique, qu’on observe le peuple lors qu’il cherche en même temps a voir et a entendre un orateur parlant dans un Place: d’abord un demicercle se forme devant l’orateur qui est alors a peu prês le centre de tous les rayons; si les rayons se prolongent, les nouveaux Spectateurs gagnent sur les côtés de l’orateur en augmentant la Circonference, ils forment en fin presque les trois quarts d’un cercle voulant toujours voir l’orateur et en être ple plus prês possible afin de l’entendre. Partant de ce principe naturelle dans lequel mon experience m’a confirmé, j’etablis une proportion Geométrique a tous les Théâtres telles dimension qu’on veuille leurs donner.” BNF MNS. NAF 2479/439.

195 architectural composition had adopted geometric assemblages generated out of physical and mechanical notions of the function of sense organs.

Patte’s Essai sur l’Architecture Théâtrale exhibits this geometrization of sense clearly in explaining the links between architectural form and sensory function. For

Patte, it is no longer simply the view (vue) for hearing (ouie) that is to be bolstered by proper theatre architecture; rather the architect must be mindful of anatomical form. “Il est manifeste qu’une Salle de Spectacles se trouveroit un composé de formes optiques & acoustiques les plus propres à favoriser les organes de nos plaisirs”368 (It is manifest that a theatre hall would be a composite of optical and acoustical forms most proper to favoring the organs of our pleasure). This entails not simply assembling ellipses, cones and circles in an approximation of modern or ancient architectural habit, but merging architectural and anatomical contours through the projected rays of sight and sound. The inscrutability of sound and hearing, and the relatively thorough comprehension of optics acknowledged by Voltaire in 1757, however, made optics a more fertile and stable domain for architectural application.

The more assured tone in Patte’s section on optics is clear: “La meilleure maniere

& à la fois la plus naturelle de voir un objet, c’est sans contredit de le regarder en face, sans être obligé de hausser, de baisser ou de tourner la tête, c’est-à-dire de façon que les rayons visuels tombent perpendiculairement dans l’œil”369 (The best and at the same time the most natural manner of seeing an object is without doubt to regard it from the front without need of raising, lowering or turning the head, which is to say in such a way that

368 Patte, 32-3.

369 Ibid., 24.

196 the visual rays fall perpendicularly into the eye). The geometry of light, and the function of the eye are sufficiently transparent to allow the architect to unify the spectator’s sensory function with architectural contours into one geometric assembly. The spectator, already abstracted into the subject of a momentary act of apprehending stage objects through sight and sound, undergoes a further tranformation by the mid-1780s. With reference to experimental physics, the protocols of which demand a clear and distinct sensory encounter with discrete natural phenomena, the spectatorial function is translated into a system of spatially bounded, rationally accessible mechanical phenomena.

The spectatorial view, for Patte, is informed by the practice of painterly perspective, but the architect’s concern is simply to enforce “la maniere de voir les objets scéniques” (the manner of seeing the scenic objects). Patte’s optical program for theatre architecture accordingly consists of three limitations: first, the spectator should not be too far from the stage; second, the spectator ought not be placed too high, so that the angle of view does not become too steep; and third, the shape of the salle ought not hinder the direct view of the stage. The ideal spectatorial view, then, is rendered into a matrix of visual rays converging on the stage, and supported by the shape of the salle: “Sa courbe doit être de nature à ne mettre aucun obstacle à ce que l’œil du spectateur embrasse toute l’ouverture du Théâtre, & même puisse prolonger ses rayons visuels jusqu’à la toile du fond, sans l’interposition d’aucun corps opaque”370 (Its curve should be of such a nature as to create no obstacle to the spectator’s eye taking in the entire stage opening, and also should be able to extend his or her visual rays as far as the back canvas without the interposition of any opaque body). The specifications of the physicist, who Patte claims

370 Ibid., 28.

197 limits the vertical angle of comfortable eyesight to 30 degrees, have supplanted the recommendations of the scenographer or painter. The spectator has been abstracted into a set of geometric limits, and alienated from his or her aesthetic origins.

Conclusion

Pierre Patte exhibits the hallmarks of an architectural theory that has transformed the spectatorial function in the process of assimilating it. Spectatorship is effectively decoupled from the aesthetic tradition of theatrical and painterly perspective to which it has been attached—and out of which it was largely constituted in the Italian baroque tradition—and reconfigured to express its physical, anatomical and mechanical function.

In other words, it has taken on the attributes of a scientific and objective gaze.

Spectatorship, after having been instrumentalized not only for the program of moral education espoused by theatrical proponents, but also pressed into service as a set of techniques disposed to diffusing the knowledge produced by experimental physics, is reduced in the 1780s to a set of physiological attributes, competencies, and limitations.

Whereas Pierre Frantz has tracked the emergence of a new visual paradigm in dramatic theory and practice oriented around the aesthetic unit of tableau, the theoretical documents of French theatre architecture reform in the decade before the revolution show the set of functions attributed to the spectator reflecting epistemological conditions that

Foucault identified in late Enlightenment studies of living organisms. According to

Foucault, the eighteenth century study of life gave rise to certain new “analyses,” among which

[t]here are those that operate within the space of the body, and – by studying perception, sensorial mechanisms, neuro-motor diagrams, and the articulation common to things and to the organism – function as a sort of

198 transcendental aesthetic; these led to the discovery that knowledge has anatomo-physiological conditions, that it is formed gradually within the structures of the body, that it may have a privileged place within it, but that its forms cannot be dissociated from its peculiar functioning; in short, that there is a nature of human knowledge that determines its own forms and that can at the same time be made manifest to it in its own empirical contents.371

This heretofore neglected alignment between spectatorial function, and the body- mindedness of Enlightenment materialist theories of knowledge, bears ramifications for both the historiography of European theatre architecture and theatre practice alike.

In this chapter I have attempted to track several tendencies in theatre architecture reform between 1748 and 1785, especially with respect to the development and deployment of the spectator within the discourses that accreted to the reform movement:

First, the priorities expressed by agents of reform within and outside of the academic/royal architectural establishment gradually converged after Voltaire’s 1748 clarion call for improved French theatres, until by the end of the 1760s, the concerns issuing from theatre practitioners and spectators were virtually indistinguishable from those advanced by professional architects. Second, this convergence of architectural and spectatorial concerns witnessed the abstraction of the spectator into the subject of an object-oriented sensory apprehension, which in turn came to occupy an increasingly primary role for architects and amateurs who wrote theoretical documents or produced ideal theatre designs. Finally, as reformers referred increasingly to knowledge of acoustical and optical dynamics generated by contemporary experimental physics, the abstract spectatorial function that grounded theatre architecture was rationalized into a set of more or less transparent mechanical relationships, of which optics provided the most apparent and credible applications for architects.

371 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 319.

199 The latter two of these tendencies demonstrate the modification within architectural discourse of a phenomenon I described in my first chapter: the alignment of the spectatorial encounter with the stage within dramatic theory with the natural philosopher’s sensory encounter with the natural world. As the concretized view of the stage necessarily employed by theatre architects incorporated reference to experimental physics, however, the spectatorial coup d’œil, was presented as a mechanical function that allowed architects to incorporate the physiological, sensing body of the spectator within geometric assemblies of theatre buildings. As I will argue in my next chapter, this merging of physiological function and anatomical form within theatre architecture helps unpack the metaphysical freight of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s provocative engraving,

Coup d’œil du Théâtre de Besançon, and conditions the alignment of representations of stage space with the dominant representation of space operative within natural philosophy.

200 CHAPTER 4

OPTICS AND REPRESENTATIONS OF STAGE SPACE IN EIGHTEENTH-

CENTURY FRENCH THEATRE DESIGN

The vast resemblance we find between the eye and a darkened room may induce us to hope that for the future, philosophers will agree pretty well in their accounts of vision. -Francesco Algarotti, 1737

We are beginning to glimpse the uniformity of nature; these as yet still weak rays of light are due to the study of natural history. But how far does this uniformity go?

-Julien Offray de la Mettrie, 1748

Everything is related to the eye.

-Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, 1784

Historians of architecture have read Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s 1804372 engraving

Coup d’œil du Théâtre de Besançon as depicting the reflection of a Palladian bank of seats in the center of an outsized human eye (fig. 0.1). According to this interpretation, the eye appears to face outward from a stage toward the curved auditorium and semicircular colonnade of Ledoux’s only fully realized public theatre, which stood in

Besançon from its completion in 1784 until its destruction by fire in 1958.373 Michel

Gallet’s 1980 monograph on Ledoux, for example, claims that reflection gives structure to the image: “Among the pages of the Architecture, there is none so well known as that

372 The date of this image is uncertain. It first appeared in 1804, in Ledoux’s L’architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des mœurs, et de la législation. However, since the image and its accompanying essays are linked to Ledoux’s Théâtre de Besançon, which opened in 1784, the creation of the image may predate the Revolution. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, L’architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des mœurs, et de la législation (Paris: Chez l’auteur, rue Neuve d’Orléans, 1804).

373 Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet, La vision d’un futur, Ledoux et ses théâtres (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1983), 107.

201 of the eye that reflects within its pupil the circular auditorium of Besançon and the surrounding colonnade, like that at Vicenza.”374

Several scholars have adopted this reading, which spatially opposes the visual organ with a neoclassical amphitheatre. Wend von Kalnein, Downing Thomas, Beat

Wyss, and George Hersey casually endorse the reflective interpretation of Ledoux’s engraving with little attention to the instability of the composition, or interest in the complexity purchased by this instability.375 To read Ledoux’s image of the neoclassical auditorium as subsisting in pure reflection, however, is to raise questions about the surface that supports the reflection, and the architect seems to have deliberately banished clues that would fix the depth of a reflecting surface in the center of the eye. In fact, shading on the sclera to either side of the iris abruptly vanishes at the cusp of the circumscribed auditorium, suggesting that if, indeed, the auditorium is a reflection, the reflecting surface lies beyond a purely transparent or altogether absent cornea. The engraving also bears no signs of interaction between the descending cone of light that traverses the pupil and any reflective surface at the front of the eye. Despite these conflicting visual cues, only Anthony Vidler and Daniel Rabreau, in their thorough studies of Ledoux’s career, acknowledge that Ledoux’s image is structured by a

374 Michel Gallet, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (Paris: Picard, 1980), 130.

375 Wend von Kalnein, Architecture in France in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 236; Downing A. Thomas, “Architectural Visions of Lyric Theatre and Spectatorship in Late-Eighteenth-Century France” Representations 52 (1995): 60; Beat Wyss, “Ragnarok of Illusion: Richard Wagner’s ‘Mystical Abyss’ at Bayreuth” October 54 (1990): 57; George L. Hersey, Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 58.

202 paradoxical duality, one that “suggests a view through a transparent pupil to the empty auditorium as well as its reflection.”376

The solely reflective interpretation that many scholars have applied to Ledoux’s image retrojects him into an absolutist baroque paradigm of mirror-like reflection and infinite combinatory potential. While such a historiographical oversight is understandable given Ledoux’s infamously vague phrasings, the philosophical and aesthetic conditions that generated his theory of theatre architecture enable a better grounded interpretation of the image. Ledoux overlays reflection and transparency, calling the “first frame” (le premier cadre) depicted in his engraving the “transparent mirror of nature” (miroir transparent de la nature).377 That is, he attempts to combine the catoptric and dioptric dynamics that permeate both Enlightenment epistemology and theatrical representation within his utopian theatre project. The corneal surface that reflects the world, and the ocular cavity that embraces it present an attempt to reconcile the contemplative, a priori legalities of the seventeenth century with the mediate sensory data that characterize eighteenth-century aesthetics. Ledoux’s enigmatic composition in other words discloses the animating theatrical instability that embodies the irreducible representational structure of Enlightenment theories of knowledge.

If the transparency of Ledoux’s eye—along with the superimposition of ocular anatomy and theatre architecture that it depicts—constitutes a blind spot for the history of architecture, for theatre studies it marks a veritable lacuna. Ledoux is not covered in

376 Anthony Vidler, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Social Reform at the End of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, Massachussetts and London: The MIT Press, 1990), 177. See also Daniel Rabreau’s detailed analysis of this image in Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806): L’architecture et les fastes du temps (Bordeaux: William Blake & Co./Art & Arts, 2000), 142-7.

377 Ledoux, L’architecture considérée, 373.

203 Brockett’s standard history of theatre, which, like George Izenour’s Theater Design, anoints Wagner and Bruckwald’s Bayreuth Festspielhaus as the paragon of modern

Western theatre architecture.378 For Anglophone theatre architecture historiography,

Ledoux’s theatre design and those of his Ancien Régime contemporaries are malformed hybrids, uninformed by the science of acoustics refined in the early nineteenth century and stranded from “the main line of development” by the neoclassical formalities and utopian social visions that molded them.379 The late-eighteenth century is therefore identified as a period of exuberant but misguided experimentation in an evolutionary narrative for which the development of engineering techniques and their rational application constitute the positive core of historical change.380 Ledoux’s identification of the proscenium arch with what he calls the “first frame” of vision, however, is more than a biomorphic whimsy. Rather, it points to and helps decipher a pattern of appropriation on the part of eighteenth-century theatre architects of geometric forms and spatial relationships native to optics.

In previous chapters, I have argued that two mid-century developments—1) the elision of the academic distinction between the world of facts (D’Aubignac’s grand

Monde) and the discrete, extra-factual Mondes particuliers of the stage, and 2) the accretion of rehearsal protocols and spectatorial practices to paratheatrical experimental physics lecture-demonstrations—show that the theatre spectator’s encounter with objects

378 It is worth mentioning here that Ledoux’s Besançon Théâtre was an influence for the Festspielhaus of Wagner and Bruckwald. See H. Leclerc, Au Théâtre de Besançon (1775-1784) C.-N. Ledoux; réformateur et précursor de Richard Wagner, (Paris: Impr. Michel Brient, 1958).

379 Oscar Brockett, History of the Theatre, 9th ed. (New York: Allyn and Bacon, 2003), 171.

380 Izenour offers the least restrained version of the evolutionary narrative. For Izenour, features like asymmetry that violate the laws of good theatre design, “like all other fads and contagious diseases, [will pass] from the scene” (28). He claims that the history of theatre design witnesses the positive accumulation of technical knowledge through a constant sifting action carried out in practice.

204 of theatrical representation had become aligned with natural philosophy’s subjective encounter with the world. In this chapter, I will argue that for Ledoux and his contemporaries optics provided a framework for the cultivation of a clear and distinct spectatorial encounter with the stage, and that these architects consequently treated optics as a fund of knowledge from which the morphological particulars of theatre buildings could be derived. Specifically, the appearance of circular and spherical salles, conical formations of visual rays, and tripartite divisions of stage space together constitute an ocular theme that describes many theatres designed in the decades that preceded the

Revolution.

This ocular theme in architecture at once reinforces and complicates David Wiles’ recent depiction of the history of Western performance space. Wiles links the strict division of stage and house in European theatre architecture to the rationalist metaphysics of Descartes whose differentiation between mental substance (res cogitans) and material substance (res extensa) instanced a “Cartesian theatrical dichotomy” manifest in proscenium architecture.381 While the architectural phenomenon I describe in this chapter shores up Wiles’ notion that performance space draws on prevalent epistemic conditions, it also suggests that the “ocularity” Wiles identifies with modern Western theatre architecture cannot be solely attributed to a simplified Cartesian metaphysics.

The convergence of theatrical and ocular morphologies in architecture also testifies to the late French Enlightenment’s preoccupation with the physiological conditions of knowledge, and an empiricist suspension of totalizing theories in favor of discrete factual observations.

381 David Wiles, A Short History of Western Performance Space (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 7.

205 The points of similarity and channels of direct exchange between theatrical and optical models of vision are an important component of the close relationship that was sustained between theatrical representation and natural philosophy in the mid-eighteenth century. In the decades that witnessed France’s theatre architecture reform movement, real objects were subjected to a spectatorial regard—an “optique du théâtre”—that closely observed discrete phenomena, and was theorized according to a crude mechanics of sense. Dramatic theory and theatre architecture theory meanwhile adopted the sensationist language of “objects” of theatrical representation along with a heightened attention to the sensory mechanics that mediated between such objects and the mind of the spectator. Thus, theatre architecture and the mechanics of vision merged in these architectural plans, providing a graphical corollary to the French eighteenth-century vision-centric dramaturgy of tableau.

All this implies not only that theatre architecture responded to prevailing notions of the conditions of human knowledge, but also that scientific knowledge, and the theories of human understanding that supported it, had already incorporated a representational structure akin to theatrical mimesis. Ledoux’s “ocular rebus”382 thus serves as an emblem for the discursive and conceptual traffic sustained between theatre and epistemology in eighteenth-century France.

I. The Theatrical Model of Vision

Before detailing the ways that reformist theatre architecture made use of optical forms, it is necessary to briefly situate vision within eighteenth-century philosophy and

382 Rabreau, Ledoux, 144.

206 theatre practice, and to delineate the two types of space that I contend linked theatrical and philosophical representations during this period. Visual sense occupied a place of priority in the intellectual landscape of Enlightenment France, and was a key term especially for theories of knowledge and of drama. For the purposes of my study, however, it is necessary to look beyond the bland centrality of vision toward the specific attributes that allowed optics to serve as a conduit linking knowledge production to theatricality. For mid-century philosophes vision—the principal object of optical science383—uniquely demonstrated not only the reliability, transparency and universality of human knowledge, but also harbored a representational function that mediated between external objects and sense-based mental images. The analogy of the visual and theatrical frames announced in Ledoux’s engraving may therefore be read both to impose the moral and social priorities of Enlightenment philosophy onto the theatre and to install theatre’s mimetic representational structure within the function of consciousness itself.

Vision was, for mid-eighteenth century savants, both the most highly esteemed of the senses and a synecdoche for conscious ideation writ large. The mathematized space of optics dominated eighteenth-century natural philosophy: it constituted a fundamental condition for apprehending natural phenomena. The Encyclopédie entry on optics related that

L'Optique est une branche considérable de la Philosophie naturelle, tant parce qu'elle explique les lois de la nature, suivant lesquelles la vision se fait, que parce qu'elle rend raison d'une infinité de phénomenes physiques qui seroient

383 D’Alembert wrote in the Encyclopédie that optics was “proprement la science de la vision direct, c’est- à-dire, de la vision des objets par des rayons qui viennent directement & immédiatement de ces objets à nos yeux sans être ni rompus, ni réflechis par quelque corps. […] Optique, se dit aussi dans un sens plus étendu de la science de la vision en général” (properly the science of direct vision, which is to say of vision of objects by way of rays that come directly and immediately from these objects to our eyes without being broken or reflected by any body. […] Optics is also used in a wider sense to speak of the science of vision in general). Jean le Rond d’Alembert, “Optique,” Encyclopédie (1766), 11:517.

207 inexplicables sans son secours. En effet, n'est ce pas par les principes de l'Optique qu'on explique une infinité d'illusions & d'erreurs de la vûe, une grande quantité de phénomenes curieux, comme l'arc-en-ciel, les parhélies, l'augmentation des objets par le microscope & les lunettes?384

(Optics is a considerable branch of natural philosophy, as much because it explains the laws of nature according to which vision is made as because it applies reason to an infinity of physical phenomena that would be inexplicable without its aid. In effect, is it not by way of the principles of optics that we explain an infinity of illusions and errors of vision, a large quantity of curious phenomena like the rainbow, atmospheric halos, the augmentation of objects by the microscope and lenses?)

Such discoveries depended not just on close visual observation, but on an understanding of visual sense wedded to a conceptual space rooted in Euclidean geometry and enhanced by catoptric instruments. The mechanics of light rays and their interaction with reflective surfaces and transparent media allowed philosophers to link the a priori verity of mathematical knowledge with the materiality of sense impressions that underlay empiricist psychology. The metrical, planar, uniform space of optics permeated

Enlightenment thought, and provided a vivid example of the mathematical language of nature that the philosophes credited Newton with decoding.

Later in this chapter I will argue that this optical space absorbed a set of graphical conventions that approximated architectural drawings. The abstract space of

Enlightenment optics lent itself to architectural use because it already subsisted in drawing practices that, like architectural drafting, applied geometric forms to material entities. In fact, within the theatre architecture reform movement in France these two conceptual representations of space were thoroughly merged. Theatre architects, who were inclined to reduce spectatorship to a mechanical sensory function, grafted optical space onto the stage. This imitation of optical space, however, directly affected just one

384 Anonymous, Encyclopédie, 11:517.

208 level of spatiality that operated in theatre practice. Henri Lefebvre identifies the representation of space at work in theatre with “scenic space—corresponding to a particular conception of space (that of the classical drama, say or the Elizabethan, or the

Italian).”385 While a thorough account of the abstract space deployed within classical

French dramaturgy would exceed the confines of my study, this space may be duly linked, as we saw in my first chapter, with a rationalist, Cartesian grid and a liberalized

Aristotelian continuity of place.

In my first chapter I also noted that D’Aubignac claims that “les Regles du

Théâtre ne sont pas fondées en autorité, mais en raison,” linking his theory of theatrical representation to a rationalist idealism. He goes on to assert in La Practique du Théâtre that the forestage “doit représenter un Terrain immobile” (should represent an immobile terrain), and that the space of the stage should be “présupposé ouvert dans la réalité des choses, comme il le paraît dans la représentation” (presupposed open in the reality of things, as it seems to be in the representation). That is to say, he suggests that the conceptual space of the theatre is also that of “reality.”386 Though dramatic theory and dramaturgy in France had undergone significant renovations by the mid-eighteenth century, passing through what Downing Thomas calls “the shift from absolutist to post- absolutist conceptions of the theatre,” the space that encompassed the stage as such maintained close links with the prevalent spatial metaphysics of its time:387 for

Enlightened theatre architects, the dramatic conception of space merged with the optical

385 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 188.

386 D’Aubignac, La Practique du Théâtre, 158-9.

387 Downing A. Thomas, “Architectural Visions,” 53.

209 representation of space.

Theatrical theory and practice, however, entails more than an abstract space mapped by a rectilinear grid and traversed by rays of light. As Lefebvre has commented, theatrical space simultaneously instantiates an abstract representation of space, and a

“mediated, yet directly experienced” representational space.388 Actors, technicians and spectators collaborate to deploy a lived theatrical environment that is not reducible to the space of dramatic action. In order to show that the representational frames of theatre and of natural philosophy became aligned with one another during the mid-eighteenth- century, it is not enough to show merely that the conceptual space of optics was imitated in architects’ plans. The experiential dimension of vision, and in particular the links between how spectators saw the stage and how they saw objects in general, must be examined as well. It is necessary, in other words, to demonstrate that the representational space of the theatre—that which was experienced by eighteenth-century spectators and hommes du théâtre—also sustained links with the visual space thought to order the world at large.

The way specific visual competencies were exploited in crafting eighteenth- century perspective décor indeed reveals how the spectator’s visual encounter with the stage resembled vision’s natural function in the world. Theatre buildings took on the contours of the anatomical means of vision in part because the spectatorial function that these buildings supported was understood to illustrate the powers and failings of vision with a high degree of functional specificity. At mid-century the theatre was already, in a sense, a model of vision. As a darkened chamber with a central, articulated opening that

388 Lefebvre, 188.

210 framed an indefinitely extended visual space mapped by a field of visual rays, the theatre might be inhabited like a vast camera obscura, a machine wherein the eye could improbably discern the secrets of its own function. Thus while the circular salle, the cone of visual rays, and the tripartite stage all testify to an architectural imitation of the conceptual space of optics, the analogy between theatre and oculus was also supported by functional correspondences that linked the architectural conditions of spectatorship with the faculty of vision.

The eye’s ability to judge distances was both a problem taken up by natural philosophy in the early eighteenth century and a matter of practical interest to scenographer/machinistes in manipulating the depth of field represented on stage. Stage scenery, in fact, was cited in widely published studies of vision, since the stage was thought to offer the spectator a uniquely comprehensive range of visual cues. Philippe La

Hire wrote in his 1694 treatise on vision that

Il y a donc cinq choses qui servent à la vuë pour juger de l’éloignement des objets, leur grandeur apparente, la vivacité de leur couleur, la direction des deux yeux, la parallaxe des objets, et la distinction des petites parties de l’objet. De ces cinq choses qui servent à fair paroître les objets proches ou éloignez, il n’y a que les deux premières dont les peintres puissent se servir dans leurs tableaux: C’est pourquoy il ne leur est pas possible de tromper parfaitement la vüe. Dans les décorations des Théâtres on joint ces cinq choses toutes ensemble, & il ne faut pas s’étonner si l’on ne sçauroit se deffendre d’être trompé. […] On représente sur differens tableaux qui sont un peu éloignez les uns des autres, les parties d’un même objet qu’on veut faire paroître à differentes distances, […] a fin que les deux yeux soient obligez de changer leur direction pour appercevoir distinctement les parties du tableau proche & de celuy qui est un peu éloigné.389

(There are then five things that serve sight in judging the distance of objects: their apparent magnitude, the vivacity of their color, the direction of the two eyes, the parallax of objects, and the distinction of the small parts of the object. Of these five things that make the objects appear near or far, the painter can only

389 Philippe La Hire, “Un traité sur les differens accidens de la vue” printed in Memoires de mathematique et de physique (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1694), 271. Michael Baxandall notes that this comparison is nearly exactly repeated by William Porterfield in his 1759 A Treatise on the Eye. See Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 91.

211 make use of the first two in his pictures; thus it is not possible for them to perfectly deceive sight. In theatrical decorations these five things are joined together, and one should not be surprised at being unable to keep oneself from being tricked. […] One depicts, in different pictures that are slightly distant from each other, the parts of the same object that one wants to make seem at different distances, […] so that the two eyes would have to change their direction to distinctly perceive the near parts of the picture and those that are a little bit farther away.)

For La Hire, theatre scenery operated on the full range of human visual capacities for judging spatial relations; the optics of perspective mise-en-scène was not simply a theatrical application of painterly practice. The stage model of visual experience, in the estimation of eighteenth-century optics, accommodated every spatial visual faculty, and was thus uniquely capable of manipulating perceived distances.

This approximation of the spectatorial regard to natural vision at the end of the seventeenth century forecast what scholars of eighteenth-century French theatre depict as the gradual displacement of classical dramaturgy rooted in linguistic rhetoric by an aesthetics that frequently invoked material visual sense. Martine de Rougement comments on an “invasion d’éléments visuels” (invasion of visual elements) such as pictorial tableaux, increased casting of extras and presentations of exotic locales in mid- century tragedy, linking this phenomenon to a “passage d’une conscience collective religieuse à une laïcité pré-matérialiste”390 (passage from a religious collective consciousness to a pre-materialist secularism). Pierre Frantz, moreover, links this emphasis on the “théâtre de l’image,” with an upsurge in popularity of optical machines including magic lanterns, which were “fondés sur des recherches optiques”391 (based on optical investigations). The spectator of theatrical amusements was construed, then, as

390 De Rougement, 34-5.

391 Frantz, L’esthétique du tableau, 58-9.

212 the subject of optical function no less than as the subject of emotion, taste, or of délicatesse.

Eighteenth-century scenographers evidently concurred with La Hire that perspective scenery functioned by exploiting the relative basis of visual judgments of distance. In his 1790 public letter Boullet explained that wide—rather than deep—stages served the needs of scenic design. He explains the eye’s susceptibility to manipulation of represented distance:

Il arrive de la que l’œil ayant toujours une échelle proportionnelle qui lui indique la dimension des objets, il ne jugera les derniers que relativement aux premiers, & alors quelque longueur que vous mettiez dans votre perspective, tous les objets en seront petits […]. En sautant des plans, au contraire, vouz éloignez de l’œil l’échelle de proportion, vous présentez un vide inappréciable ; vouz donnez carriere à l’imagination du spectateur, & vous faites paroître les derniers objets, non ce qu’ils sont, mais ce que vouz voulez. J’espere qu’en parlant ce langage, qui est l’ABC du machiniste, M. Bénard me comprendra plus aisément.392

(Thus the eye, always having a proportional scale that indicates to it the dimension of objects, only judges the farthest relative to the nearest, and so whatever depth you put in your perspective, all of its objects will be small […]. By skipping planes, however, you draw the scale of the proportion away from the eye, you present an unnoticeable void; you put the spectator’s imagination to work, and you make the farthest objects seem, not as they are, but however you want. I hope that in speaking this language, which is the ABC’s of the scenic engineer, M. Bénard will understand me more easily.)

The relativity of spatial judgments Boullet presupposes was also a tenet of the sensationist take on an epistemological problem addressed by Locke, George Berkeley, and a host of opticiens. Berkeley, in 1709 and 1732, had rejected the notion that an innate “natural geometry” apprehended the breadth of visual rays on the retina and allowed the mind to implicitly calculate the distance of objects.393 Voltaire seconded this

392 “Second Lettre de M. Boullet, Sur le Théâtre du Palais-Royal.” BHVP 6873, no. 17.

393 George Berkeley, An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (Dublin, 1709); Alciphron, the Minute Philosopher (London, 1730).

213 view in the optics portion of his 1738 Eléments de la Philosophie de Newton.394 Visual information was arbitrary, Berkeley argued, and, like language, could only be learned through comparing experiences to each other. Scenographers including Boullet, by mastering the visual cues of relative size, color and parallax, learned to depict distances at will.

Ledoux’s comparison of the “first frame” of vision to the proscenium arch referred to an architectural homology with the organ of vision, but this comparison was itself informed by a highly visualized notion of spectatorship that expanded beyond the walls of the theatre. Spectators regarded not only the stage, but also the objects of natural philosophy and natural history. 395 Essayists including Addison and Marivaux had recast the spectator into a roving bourgeois observer of the world at large. Jaucourt’s

“Spectacle” article in the Encyclopedia, as I noted in my third chapter, succinctly describes this spectator as the subject of a semi-autonomous sense of vision.

Vision’s desire for multiple objects was just one attribute of spectatorship that theatre architects sought to accommodate. Theatre architecture’s appropriation of optics therefore suggests that, by the 1780s, architects thought that objects of theatrical representation were subject to techniques of observation like those practiced in scientific inquiry. This premise conforms with the coagulation of spectatorial practices and theatrical metaphors around mid-century experimental physics lecture demonstrations I

394 Voltaire, Œuvres Complètes, vol. 15, 317-21.

395 The Abbé Pluche’s 1732 Le spectacle de la nature, for example, which was widely read and translated in Europe during the eighteenth century, purported to “prendre dans le scène de la nature, ce qui peut frapper vivement et excercer utilement la raison” (“take within the scene of nature that which can boldly strike and usefully exercise reason”). Quoted by Dennis Trinkle in “Noël-Antoine Pluche’s ‘Le Spectacle de la Nature,’” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 358 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1997): 99.

214 described in my second chapter (e.g., to some extent, the objects of theatre and of the natural world were subject to a common spectatorial regard). The optically inflected projections of stage space that I describe below thus amount to one symptom of a broader alignment of the representational frame of the theatre with that which operated within natural philosophy.

II. Optics and the Architectural Eye

Late eighteenth-century architects in France were well versed in optics and believed that science was essential to their vocation. At mid-century, optics remained a fundamental part of the standard physics instruction imparted by Jesuit colleges.396

Though Newton had developed physical optics into an autonomous field of study and philosophers had begun to treat the physics of light apart from subjective visual appearances,397 during the decades that witnessed the overhaul of French theatre architecture, optics still referred generally to the study of vision. The geometry of optics was thus instrumental in the creation of architectural images. In a 1749 dialogue, Lafont de Saint-Yenne wrote that “la science même de l’Optique, [est] nécessaire à l’Architecte”

(the science of optics [is] necessary to the architect), since it helps one see the relationship between objects from a variety of perspectives.398

Architects including Charles-Nicolas Cochin and Gabriel Dumont worked as engravers and draughtsmen, and were required to master the fundamentals of perspective,

396 René Taton, Enseignement et diffusion des sciences en France au XVIIIe siècle, (Paris: Hermann, 1964), 35-7.

397 Nicholas J. Wade, A Natural History of Vision (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 1998), 9-11.

398 Lafont de Saint-Yenne, 111.

215 a practice strongly allied with the mechanics of light and the psychology of vision.399

Professional architects thus studied the geometric projection of light rays represented in perspectiva artificialis, the painterly device that since the sixteenth century had oriented scenographic painting and, to some extent, theatre-building interiors around a central vanishing point.400 As a vital component of architectural drawing skills, perspective ensured that optics remained a part of architectural trade, and the central role it played in the scenic design of the eighteenth century made perspective a key term in determining the interior proportions of theatre buildings.401 This in part explains the increasing interest in optics displayed by theatre architects in the 1770s and 1780s. But the optical forms borrowed by Ledoux and his peers were by no means restricted to the ratios and angles that generated the illusions of perspective scenery.

Unlike their predecessors Serlio and Vigarani, French theatre architects were not experts in perspective scenic practices. Some architects failed to provide adequate space for stage machinery or for storage of scenic flats in their designs. Boullet, the scenic engineer of the Versailles Opera, railed against the insufficient stage width of Victor

Louis’ new theatre at the Palais Royal in a 1790 public letter, and attributed this flaw to the architect’s “défaut de connoissance du service des théâtres”402 (lack of knowledge of

399 De Jaucourt’s Encyclopédie entry under “Perspective” includes cross-references to both “Optics” and “Vision,” 12:433.

400 T.E. Lawrenson, The French Stage in the Seventeenth-Century, 16.

401 Germain Boffrand’s claim that “an edifice, by its composition, expresses as on a stage that the scene is pastoral or tragic, that it is a temple or a palace, a public building destined to a specific use, or a private house” suggests that the architectural regard can be linked to the wider eighteenth-century spectatorial attitude articulated by Addison, Steele and Marivaux. Germain Boffrand, Livre d’architecture (Paris, 1745), 16. Trans. G.L. Hersey in “Associationism and Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Architecture” Eighteenth-Century Studies 4, 1 (1970): 71-89.

402 Boullet, “Réponse à la lettre de M. Louis, Insérée dans le supplément du Journal de Paris du 30 avril 1790.” BHVP 6873, no. 15.

216 the operation of stages). Though theatre architects were generally aware of the demands of vanishing point perspective sets, and though some fixed the dimensions of their stages according to scenographic conventions,403 they also proposed infeasible decorative innovations like the three-part stage that were ultimately rejected in practice.404 Despite the centrality of perspective to theatre practice, the principles of scenic décor do not adequately explain the French application of optics to theatre design.

Nonetheless, as the push to reform French theatre architecture gathered momentum after 1760, architects began to justify their theatre designs by citing optics.

This embrace of light and vision transcended the Euclidean foundations of perspective.

Mid-century architectural reformers were less concerned with refining scenic illusions than with enforcing a clear and distinct sensory encounter with the stage. Theatre architects in the second phase of the reform movement (1765-1784) referred to physics in justifying the aural and visual enhancements offered in their theatre plans. The author of the 1769 Exposition des Principes was the first to explicitly invoke optics in a treatise on theatre design, claiming that “les principes de l’optique nous prescrivent, comme les regles de l’acoustique, la situation des spectateurs”405 (the principles of optics prescribe for us, like the rules of acoustics, the arrangement of the spectators). Two years before the opening of Ledoux’s theatre at Besançon, Pierre Patte proposed a significant, if naïve,

403 Charles de Wailly and Gabrielle Dumont designed perspective decorations for specific plays. The anonymous author of the 1769 Exposition des Principes qu’on doit suivre…, among others, proscribes a stage “assez vaste pour laisser de l’espace aux grands effets de la perspective” (large enough to allow space for grand perspective effects), 95.

404 The three-part stage proposed by Peyre and De Wailly for the new Théâtre Français was eliminated for blocking too much of the stage. See Rabreau, Le Théâtre et l’embellissement des villes, 188-9.

405 Anonymous, Exposition des Principes, 19.

217 architectural application of optical principles. His Essay on Theatre Architecture bore the subtitle, On the Most Advantageous Arrangement of a Theatre Building According to the Principles of Optics and Acoustics, and held that

… un Théâtre relativement à son objet qu’il ne faut pas perdre de vue, doit être un composé de formes optiques & acoustiques, les plus propres à favoriser les yeux & les oreilles; & tout ce qui contrarie ce but doit être invariablement proscrit dans son ordonnance.406

(… a theatre, relative to its purpose, of which one must not lose sight, ought to be a composite of optical and acoustical forms, the most proper to favor the eyes and ears, and everything contrary to this goal must be invariably prohibited in its arrangement.)

Patte’s ambiguous formulation, “un composé de formes optiques & acoustiques,” highlights an important factor in the development of theatre designs that appeared after

1765: though a growing contingent supported basing a theatre’s interior form on physical principles, architects were divided as to how that science recommended one auditorium shape over another. In 1801, Boullet complained of a “lack of fixed theory” of theatre design.407 The wide range of theories of theatrical acoustics gives a sense of the flexibility with which physics was applied to theatre architecture in the 1770s and 80s.

As Patte observed, it was hard to think of a question over which there was less agreement than the proper shape of a theatrical interior.408 Some architects cited Vitruvius’ observation that the propagation of sound waves showed that circular forms were acoustically superior.409 Architects, however, were capable of far more imaginative reasoning in defending their designs. The Chevalier de Chaumont compared the inside of

406 Patte, supra., [ ].

407 Boullet, Essai sur l’art de construire les théâtres, leurs machines et leurs mouvemens (Paris: chez Ballard, 1801), vi.

408 Patte, Essai sur l’architecture Théâtrale, 1.

409 See for example Charles de Wailly’s “Mémoire sur le projet,” BNF MNS. NAF 2479/416.

218 a theatre to a large ear trumpet.410 Francesco Algarotti, in his 1762 Essay on the Opera, ridiculed theorists who thought that a bell-shaped house would enhance architectural acoustics:

It is not difficult to discover how such a notion could be received; it was from the similitude or analogy, which unphilosophical heads thought they discovered between the figure of a bell and the sound it gave. […]

An absurdity of this sort can only be adopted by such understandings as believe that the person who is born under the sign of Aquarius will undergo great perils upon the sea, or by those who against the bite of a serpent prescribe as a sovereign specific the serpentine wood, because it resembles a serpent; with many other inferences equally ridiculous, yet have been esteemed as the legitimate children of analogy when the syllogistic sophistry of the schools had disgraced the name of philosophy.411

In the absence of a settled theory of architectural acoustics, architects justified some theatre designs with what Algarotti derided as crude analogies reminiscent of the logical contortions of scholastic philosophy. Patte’s endorsement of “optical and acoustical forms” therefore by no means implies that rational applications of optics or acoustics prevailed in the decades before the Revolution. Architects confidently defended a wide variety of salle shapes on acoustical grounds. Ledoux’s “coup d’œil,” which superimposes the proscenium arch on the curve of the iris, suggests that such analogies were not just grounded in acoustics; optical and ocular forms also offered models to theatre architects.

Optics was both a practical tool for the architectural trade and a vivid example of the geometric relations believed to underlie all natural phenomena. What’s more, there

410 Chevalier de Chaumont, Veritable Construction d’un théâtre d’opera (Paris: Chez de Lormel, 1766), 11.

411 Francesco Algarotti, An Essay on the Opera/Saggio sopra l’opera in musica (anonymous English translation of 1768), Studies in the History and Interpretation of Music 120, trans. Robin Burgess, (Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005) 61. A French translation of the essay appeared in 1773.

219 was reason for mid-century savants to favor optical science, since natural philosophers considered optics uniquely transparent to reason. Voltaire remarked in a 1757 letter that,

“Nous ne pouvons pas avoir autant de connaissance sur l’acoustique, que sur l’optique.

Les sons ne donnent pas autant de prise à la géométrie que la lumière”412 (We cannot have as much knowledge of acoustics as of optics. Sounds give less purchase to geometry than does light). Voltaire, like Berkeley, rejected the visual theory of “natural geometry,” but he did not minimize the importance of geometry to the study of optics itself.413 For both Descartes and Newton, studies of optics served as prime examples of philosophical method, and their treatises were considered to have laid bare the mathematical language of nature. For French eighteenth-century architects like De

Wailly, Patte and Ledoux, who were versed in optics, preoccupied with practical architectural function, and enamored of natural models, optics suggested a variety of possible applications. The science of light was furthermore disposed to architectural analogy not only because it derived geometric spatial relations from nature, but also because during the seventeenth century, verbal and graphical descriptions of the eye printed in optical treatises had themselves taken on distinctly architectural features.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the eye was thought of as a kind of optical machine with moving parts that resembled architectural entities. In 1671, the

Cartesian philosopher Jacques Rohault constructed a large mechanical eye from heavy paper and a glass lens in order to better understand the organ’s function. 414 Rohault’s

412 Voltaire’s Correspondance, Letter 6753.

413 G.N. Cantor, “Berkeley, Reid, and the Mathematization of Mid-Eighteenth-Century Optics,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 38, No. 3 (July-Sept., 1977): 429-37.

414 Jacques Rohault, quoted in Wade, 26, 30.

220 project illuminates a crucial point: the eye’s mechanical properties were believed to be transferable to inorganic constructions. The architectural eye also appears in the language of early modern optical treatises. In 1604 Kepler likened the iris to the folding doors

(valuae) of a large building.415 This sort of architectural metaphor continued into the eighteenth century; the astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille described the pupil as an

“ouverture […] bordée d’une espece de rideau noir, gris ou bleuâtre”416 (opening […] bordered by a sort of black, gray or blueish curtain). This particular comparison is all the more suggestive of theatrical analogy in light of the tendency of architects to refer to the avant-scène (forestage) and proscenium arch as the ouverture, or opening, of the stage.

The adjective vicieuse—meaning corrupt or defective—was applied to both deformed ocular anatomy and poorly shaped theatre architecture in the late eighteenth century, suggesting that the relationship between form and function was similarly conceived in both anatomy and architecture.417 The architectural qualities of early modern representations of the eye, however, are most strikingly apparent in graphical depictions of the organ in optical treatises.

George L. Hersey has remarked that the illustration of retinal inversion published in Descartes’ 1637 Dioptrique depicts an eye that is “architectural in scale as well as design.”418 Indeed, this rendering of the eye displays a geometric regularity more akin to an architectural section than an anatomical drawing (fig. 4.1). The image shows a

415 Kepler, Optics, trans. Densmore and Donohue, 79.

416 Nicolas Louis de Lacaille, Traité d’Optique, Nouvelle Edition (Paris: Librairie économique, 1802), 88.

417 Lacaille described visual aberrations as the result of “une constitution vicieuse” of the eye. The author of the Exposition des Principes stated that “l’usage des formes vicieuses ou triviales” hindered French theatre architecture. See Lacaille, 91; Anonymous, Exposition des principes, vi.

418 George L. Hersey, Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque, 57.

221 philosopher gazing upward at a gigantic oculus from which the outer tissue has been scraped away in back installed in the wall of a darkened chamber to show the reversal of images projected on the back of the eye. The sclera that encloses the larger chamber or vitreous humor of Descartes’ eye is described by three quarters of a circle, flanked by symmetrical portions of dissected ocular muscles, and capped by the arc of a dome-like cornea. The eye is shown built into the chamber wall, portraying a sort of architectural- anatomical hybrid that divides interior and exterior space.419 Rays of light that originate from external objects, traverse the opening of the pupil, and terminate at the retina are depicted with hashed lines that resemble the marks of architectural regulating geometry.

Many of those who studied optics during the seventeenth century abstracted the ocular cross-section to a perfect circle, but not all optical treatises repeated this convention. Christoph Scheiner, in his 1619 Oculus Hoc Est, drew an aspherical eye that is now considered the first anatomically accurate rendition of the organ.420 Circular drawings of the eye thus were not grounded in anatomical observation; and while the circular section was easier to draw, it also showed the anatomy of vision to conform to the harmonic system of mathematical relations nature was believed to exhibit. Johannes

Kepler, who is considered to have founded modern optics and who first described the dissected eye experiment that Descartes related in the Dioptrique, believed strongly that natural forms had been divinely composed according to “principles of mathematical

419 Jonathan Crary holds that links between the eye and the camera obscura locate a paradigm of visual practice integral to the construction of an early modern observer. For Crary, the camera obscura is “inseparable from a certain metaphysic of interiority: it is a figure for both the observer who is nominally a free sovereign individual and a privatized subject confined in a quasi-domestic space, cut off from a public exterior world.” Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990), 39.

420 Clyde W. Oyster, The Human Eye: Structure and Function (Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinaeur, 1999), 99.

222 beauty.”421 In his Optics, the astronomer reproduced anatomical drawings done in 1583 by Felix Platter, whose cross section of the eye reduces the organ to a composite of arcs and line segments.422 Kepler also espoused the natural geometry theory of vision, believing that the eye judged distance through anatomically grounded calculations that would have been aided by a geometrically regular oculus.

For philosophers who considered the eye to be a divine creation on the order of other natural forms, the eye’s apparent equipoise and formal regularity was evidence of a greater cosmic order; for those simply enamored of vision’s power and precision these qualities ensured the mathematical validity of visual perception. Eighteenth-century optical treatises reproduced circular or spherical illustrations and rendered the eye upon the page with many of the trappings of architectural drawings. Diagrams of the eye in

Berkeley’s Essay (fig. 4.2) and in Robert Smith’s Compleat System of Opticks similarly depict the organ as a geometrically perfect entity. In his 1738 account of Newton’s physics, Voltaire severely abstracts the ocular form, tracing its chambers with lines of uniform weight, stripping it of anatomical detail, and enclosing it within a rectangular border (fig. 4.3).423

The representational practices that accumulated around early modern drawings of the eye were not just blandly architectural, but displayed an incipient, albeit abstract, theatrical shape. The three-quarter circle that surrounds the large chamber of Descartes’ eye reproduces the proportions of the Vitruvian theatre, of which the scenae frons

421 David Park, The Fire Within the Eye: a historical essay on the nature and meaning of light (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), 153-4.

422 Kepler, Optics, 177; See also David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), 175-7.

423 Voltaire, Eléments de la Philosophie de Newton, in Œuvres Complètes, vol. 15, 297.

223 occupied one quarter of a circular auditorium. Voltaire’s eye, like Descartes’, is oriented upward so that the external space beyond the pupil reaches toward the top of the page.

Serlio, who submitted theatre architecture to a perspectival grid, introduced the upward orientation of the stage to French architectural drawings in the sixteenth century. Serlio’s depiction of theatrical space overturned the Renaissance practice of drawing the Roman stage at the bottom of the page, as exemplified in illustrated translations of Vitruvius’ Ten

Books by Cesariano and Barbaro. By the time of Pierre Patte’s treatise, the upward orientation of stage space in plan views of theatre designs had become conventional.

This change in the conventional orientation of theatre plan drawings on the page, is one sign that theatre architects had begun to align stage space with optical space, and had consequently overturned the Renaissance practice of drawing the Vitruvian stage on the bottom of the page.

By the eighteenth century, it was common for both optical diagrams of the eye and architectural drawings of theatres to extract their objects from their respective anatomical and urban contexts, submit them to an abstract rectilinear grid, and direct their apertures upward towards a field of raw, object-enclosing space. It would be premature to speculate, however, whether optical or architectural practices were the original, imitated term in this convergence. The theatre had been identified with visual knowledge since ancient Greece, and in the early sixteenth century, Guilio Camillo had likened his famous memory theatre to a “windowed soul.”424 Thus the theatre and the structure of human knowledge clearly participated in a perpetual, mutually referential conversation of which the convergence of optics and theatre design was just one instance. In the section

424 Erasmus, Epistolae, ed. P.S. Allen and others, IX, Frances A. Yates. The Art of Memory. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) 132.

224 that follows, I will describe how theatre architects in eighteenth-century France appropriated geometric assemblies and representations of space from optics, but this is not to suggest that by 1750 the graphic conventions of modern optics had not already absorbed the architectonics of the theatre.

III. The Ocular Theme in Theatre Design

Theatre historians have overlooked the metaphysical significance of Ledoux’s ocular theatre, allowing a blind spot to persist concerning eighteenth-century French theatre architecture’s indebtedness to optics. Ledoux addresses a functional similarity between the eye and the theatre in the text that accompanies his engraving: “Le premier cadre fut sans doute celui que vous voyez; il reçoit les divines influences que embrâsent nos sens, et répercute les mondes qui nous environnent. C'est lui que compose tous les

êtres, embellit notre existence, la soutient et exerce son empire sur tout ce qui existe”425

(The first frame is doubtless that which you see; it receives the divine influences that encompass our senses, and reflects the worlds that surround us. It is this that composes all beings, embellishes our existence, supports it and exercises its dominion over all of existence). For Ledoux, the “transparent mirror” depicted in his Coup d’œil gives structure and composition to the world. While this language implies that the frame extends beyond vision to encompass all sense perception, Ledoux specifically gestures in his engraving toward an alignment of theatrical and ocular structures. The

425 Ledoux, “Coup d’œil du théâtre de Besançon,” in L’architecture considérée, 373.

225 superimposition lines up the proscenium arch with the iris, the auditorium with the retina, and the greater stage space with the world outside of the body.426

The analogy between auditorium and ocular cavea, however, demands careful scrutiny. When naively conjured as trans-historical entities, the proscenium theatre and the human eye display a peculiar isomorphism, but neither object is constituted outside of history. Ledoux’s comparison of theatre design to ocular anatomy is best read as the product of an era in which architectural production was uniquely subject to confluences of diverse currents of knowledge. The Encyclopédistes, firm in the belief that all human knowledge could be unified, arranged knowledge in a web of cross-references, while deist theories of the natural world—like those embraced by the Freemasons, who counted

Ledoux among their ranks—viewed natural and organic entities as creations of the universe’s divine architect. Ledoux’s Coup d’œil, then, emerged amidst attempts to reconcile the prevalent materialist understanding of nature with belief in a supernatural artificer and may be plausibly read as a quasi-mystical justification of a wider appropriation of the science of light and vision to theatre architecture.427 The image also appeared at a time when Ledoux’s fellow architects urged the practical application of optics to theatre and designed theatres by building composites of optical and acoustical forms.

426 Anthony Vidler points out that the curve formed by the cornea and upper eyelid in Ledoux’s engraving roughly approximates the shape of the proscenium arch of the Théâtre de Besançon. This anatomical/architectural analogy is not the only instance of biomorphism in Ledoux’s ouvre. Claude- Nicolas Ledoux, 177.

427 If, as Serge Colomb claims, Ledoux’s “Coup d’œil” engraving includes a barely distinguishable watermark depicting Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc—a seventeenth-century illustrator, lunar cartographer, and optics enthusiast—peering through a lens, Ledoux may have intended to cite optics explicitly. See “L’architecture… de 1804: Traité d’architecture ou livre des illusions” in Claude-Nicolas Ledoux et le livre d’architecture en français (Paris: Monum, Éd. Du Patrimonie, 2006), 224-6.

226 An examination of theatre designs produced between 1765 and 1784 reveals that optical forms were indeed incorporated into theatre designs. But as Ledoux’s “first frame” analogy and Patte’s vague articulation of “optical and acoustical forms” suggest, this use of optics did not amount to what modern architects would consider a rational or systematic application. During this period, circular and spherical salles clipped by the proscenium opening were prominent, a cone of visual rays was commonly used to regulate the proportions of the house and stage, and stage space was frequently divided by architects into three diverging regions. Together, these morphological indicators suggest that Ledoux’s “first frame” refers to a crude biomorphic analogy between ocular anatomy and theatre architecture entertained by late eighteenth-century architects. For the purposes of my study it is necessary only to demonstrate that this ocular theme entailed a high degree of congruence between representations of space that operated within optics and theatre architecture; this, in turn, supports a broader alignment of the representational frame that positioned the subject of Enlightenment natural philosophy with that employed in dramatic theory and theatre practice.

a. Circular Salles

Theatre architects in the third quarter of the eighteenth century debated the advantages of a wide array of possible theatre interior shapes. The majority of architects advocated one of three forms: the circle or semi-circle, the oval joined to the stage on its long side, or the oval truncated by the stage at its end. Louis Hautecoeur claims that the last of these forms was the most utilized, citing Germain Soufflot’s temporary opera in the Tuileries Palace, Moreau’s opera at the Palais Royal, Ange-Jacques Gabriel’s

227 Versailles Opera, the Théâtre Français designed by Marie-Joseph Peyre and Charles de

Wailly, Victor Louis’ Théâtre-Français, and other completely built theatres.428 This claim, however, unduly minimizes the importance of circular geometry in late eighteenth- century French theatre design.429 Soufflot and Gabriel indeed followed the contemporary

Italian baroque model of the long oval design associated with Alfieri’s Turin theatre, and special-use opera houses erected in Paris imitated this form through the end of the century. Increasing numbers of general use theatres and salles de comédie, however, gradually adopted the circular interior form, which became a hallmark of French theatre architecture in the nineteenth century.

A letter written by the Marquis de Marigny, Louis XV’s Directeur des Batîments, to Soufflot in May of 1763, indicates that the initial concept for a building to replace the old Comédie-Française included an oval salle like the one Soufflot had designed in Lyon.

Soufflot was to lose the Théâtre Français project to the team of Peyre and De Wailly in

1767. By the end of 1769 Marigny and the King had approved designs for a theatre with a circular interior plan (fig. 4.4). While Hautecoeur is correct that the final result of this project included a slightly oblong salle, versions of the building generated in 1769, 1770 and 1771 incorporated circular auditoria (fig. 4.5, 4.6), which suggests that the architects were reluctant to pattern their building after the Italian oval.430 De Wailly endorsed the circle on theoretical grounds: the architect believed the form to be “la plus belle, la plus regulière, elle produit en effet agréable à l’œil” (the most beautiful, the most regular; it

428 Louis Hautecoeur, Histoire de l’Architecture classique en France, t. 4, 442.

429 On the importance of circular theatre plans, see Michèle Sajous D’Oria, Bleu et Or, 48.

430 Rabreau, Le Théâtre et l’embellissement des villes, 189.

228 produces an agreeable effect on the eye).431 Jean-Baptiste-René Robinet indicated in

1777 that architectural preference for the circular salle had become all but universal.432

Peyre and De Wailly were not alone in proposing circular theatre interiors.

Theatre projects by J.D. Antoine (1774) and A.T. Broigniart (1791) enclose a circular auditorium.433 Gabrielle Dumont published anonymous plans with a circular house in his

Parallèle des Plans of 1774, and a set of drawings with a circular exterior colonnade, probably executed by Soufflot for the Théâtre Français, resides in the Bibliothèque

Nationale.434 Daniel Rabreau observes, furthermore, that Victor Louis’ monumental

1780 Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux, with its circular auditorium, was likely influenced by the early plans of Peyre and De Wailly, which were exhibited at the 1771 Paris Salon.435

The semi-circular auditorium project in André Roubo’s 1777 Traité de la construction des théâtres, Ledoux’s bell-shaped Théâtre de Besançon salle, and numerous other reformist projects, based their interior form on modifications to circular geometry. The more than two dozen plan drawings published in Alexis Donnet’s 1821

Architectonographie des Théatres testify to the fact that at the end of the eighteenth- century, variations on the circular salle constituted a defining feature of French theatre architecture.436 A flared version of the circular auditorium plan was ultimately adopted

431 Charles de Wailly, “Mémoire sur le Projet d’une nouvelle Salle à construire pour la Comédie-Française” (1768). BNF MNS. 2479/416.

432 Jean-Baptiste-René Robinet, “Theatre: Architecture,” Supplement to the Encyclopédie (1777), 4:937. 433 Michèle Sajous d’Oria, Bleu et or, 52.

434 Gabrielle Dumont, Parallèle des plans des plus belles salles (Bronx: Blom, 1968), plate 44. Wend von Kalnein attributes the anonymous designs in BNF EST. Zf. 126, no. 5, 6 to Soufflot. See Architecture in France in the Eighteenth Century, 179.

435 Rabreau, Le Théâtre et l’embellissement des villes, 363.

436 Alexis Donnet and Orgiazzi, Architectonographie des Théatres (Paris: Chez L. Mathias, 1837).

229 by Charles Garnier for his 1875 Paris Opéra, further cementing the circular interior’s place in the architectural vocabulary of French monumental theatre architecture.

The proliferation of circular plans alone hardly implies an imitation of ocular form or optical space in theatre design, but as David Wiles has noted, the ubiquity of the circle in Western theatre architecture speaks to the theatre’s alignment with representations of the totality of human knowledge.437 With this in mind, French

Enlightenment theatre architecture’s migration from the circular analogue of Vitruvius’ body-enclosing line in favor of Ledoux’s frontal coup d’œil speaks to a broader reorientation of knowledge. The circular plan was the basis of classical theatre architecture, had thus been absorbed to the point of “formalization” in sixteenth century, and was highly esteemed by eighteenth-century architects who looked to antiquity for antidotes to the baroque excesses of the Regency period.438 The circular propagation of sound waves recommended the circular auditorium on acoustical grounds, and theatre architects cited other naturally occurring circles.439 The revelatory symbolic power of

“centre, circle, and sphere” in Renaissance church design was modified, though by no means diminished, for Ledoux, who wrote that “everything in nature is circle.”440 The circle of late eighteenth-century theatre architecture is thus based in a philosophy that

437 Wiles, 163-206.

438 T.E. Lawrenson, The French Stage in the Seventeenth Century, 60-6.

439 In a 1785 manuscript accompanying plans for a theatre project in Brussels, Charles de Wailly justifies the round form by arguing that “la Nature avant tous l’avoit indique” (Nature, above all, has identified it), since a crowd of people all hoping to see and hear an orator naturally “forment en fin presque les trois quatres d’un cercle voulant toujours voir l’orateur et en être le plus près possible afin de l’entendre” (form at last nearly three fourths of a circle, still hoping to see the speaker and to be as close as possible in order to hear him). BNF MNS. NAF 2479/439.

440 Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, 2nd ed. (Chichester, UK: Academy Editions/Wiley, 1998); Ledoux, L’architecture considérée, 383.

230 founds itself less in geometric unities than in organic and mechanical bodily functions.

Circles did not just govern the proportions of theatre plans like those of Peyre and

De Wailly, Louis, and Ledoux; they were also projected into the transverse and side elevations of eighteenth-century theatre designs. The 1771 Théâtre Français design by

Peyre and De Wailly, drawings of which appeared in the 1777 supplement to the

Encyclopédie, was ordered by a governing set of concentric circles that appear in transverse elevation (fig. 4.7).441 A side elevation of the 1769 version of this project in the Archives Nationales indicates that Peyre and De Wailly’s salle was arranged around a spherical ideal (fig. 4.8).442 The depiction of upstage semi-circular arcs en plein-cintre, or roman arches, in transversal elevations published by Dumont and Roubo, as well as the late-century predilection for receding barrel vaults in scenic designs, moreover, forecasts

Ledoux’s superimposition of the circular iris and pupil onto the proscenium arch.443

Architectural visions of theatre interiors in the 1770s, therefore, took on the idealized spherical form and rounded aperture of the eye.

Late neo-classicist architects such as Soufflot, De Wailly, Roubo and Ledoux looked upon circular form both as a means of optimizing the functional demands of theatres and as a symbol for visual function itself. These architects were aware of the etymology of “théâtre;” Roubo notes that “le nom de Théâtre, vient d’un mot Grec, qui

441 “Architecture: Théâtres” Encyclopédie, (1777) planche 8. BHVP B 1170 (5).

442 Monique Mosser and Daniel Rabreau, citing similar images, write that “De Wailly avait inscrit la salle […] dans l’idée de la sphère.” “Nature et Architecture Parlante: Soufflot, De Wailly et Ledoux, touchés par les lumières” Soufflot et l’architecture des lumières (Paris: Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1986) 230; AN O1 846, 41.

443 Gabrielle Dumont, supra., pl. 15; André Jacob Roubo, Traité de la Construction des Théâtres et des Machines Théâtrales (Paris: Chez Cellot & Jombert, 1777), pl. IX.

231 signifie Voir” (the name of the theatre comes from a Greek word meaning to see).444

Peyre and De Wailly, believing that exterior features of their Théâtre Français ought to announce the function of the building, ringed the wall above the entablature with a circular “motif de l’oculus” that has been imitated by several modern French theatre architects (fig. 4.9).445 The circular and spherical form, by this time, was not just a geometric symbol for unity or for the propagation of sound waves. Theatre architects recognized the circle in the cross-section and frontal aspect of the eye, and applied the shape to theatre buildings increasingly structured according to the projection of visual rays.

b. The Cone of Vision

Drawings for a Théâtre Lyrique by Gilles Oppenord in 1734 display triangular hashed lines that overlay the stage and open outward toward the proscenium (fig. 4.10).

At first glance these lines seem to serve the same function as similar lines drawn on the stage of Andre Roubo’s 1777 project (fig. 3.7). Oppenord’s lines show the combination of circles and triangles that governs his theatre’s interior proportions. However, in plans by Roubo, De Wailly, Patte and other late century architects, the hashed lines have been recast: they now mark the boundaries of sightlines drawn from the auditorium to the depth of the stage (fig. 3.17). The functional transformation between lines that order

Oppenord’s plan and the sightlines of late century theatre architecture is revealed in a subtle point: in Oppenord’s case the lines traverse the center of the columns that frame

444 Ibid., 3.

445 Rabreau, Le théâtre et l’embellissement des villes, 186-90.

232 the proscenium arch, while Roubo’s lines produce a tangent on the inner edge of each column. For Roubo and his contemporaries, these hashed lines showed the borders of a cone of visual rays that governed the interaction between the salle and the scène, allowing the great majority of spectators to clearly and easily see the objects of theatrical representation.

This shift in drawing practices reflects theatre architecture’s absorption of a specific “optical form.” The conical formation of visual rays had been a mainstay of optics since Euclid and Al-Kindi, and was the standard geometric means of showing the relationship between the eye and external objects in both extramission and intromission theories of vision.446 The importance of this shape to theatre architecture in the late eighteenth century can also be assessed in the fact that ellipses and circles, the two salle forms most ardently defended in the 1770s and 80s, are each a species of conic section.447

Reform-minded theatre architects in France, however, also built the cone directly into their designs, using its properties to guide the interior arrangement of the buildings, and aligning theatron and oculus. This particular appropriation of optical geometry, it must be noted, did not amount to an imitation of the eye’s anatomical proportions so much as it mimicked an aspect of the organ’s function: the eye’s selection of visual rays through an aperture.

In the fifth section of his Optics, Kepler included a study of the relationship between the distance of an illuminated object and the breadth of the image it projects on the retina when bounded by the diameter of the pupil (fig. 4.11). Kepler observed that

446 Extramission theories of vision held that the eye shot rays outward towards objects. Lindberg, 12-3, 156-9.

447 G. L. Hersey, 135.

233 the greater the distance between the eye and a source of light rays, the narrower the retinal surface that will be hit by those rays.448 He concluded that a single eye was therefore capable of judging relative distances—a premise accepted by Berkeley, who rejected the notion of innate, natural geometry.449 In sightline studies of theatres, late eighteenth-century architects employed the same principle, tracing rays from a point source on the stage through an opening and judging the breadth of the area these rays hit on a curved surface. Ledoux’s proposal for a grand theatre at Marseilles, for example, includes a sightline study of the fourth loge that directly applies Kepler’s principle to theatre architecture (fig. 4.12). The optical mechanics that demonstrated the natural geometry of vision to seventeenth-century rationalists, and that continued to explain the perception of relative distances for sensationist theories of vision, also founded a key set of interior proportions for late eighteenth-century theatre design.

As I releted in chapter 3, the author of the 1769 Exposition des Principes explains the function of this visual cone, which originates from a perspective vanishing point at the back center of the stage.

Si on tire de ce point de vue quatre lignes, dont deux passent l’une sous les pieds, & l’autre sur la tête de l’acteur, & les deux autres par les bords de l’ouverture de théâtre, en se prolongeant toutes les quatre au-delà; & que l’on conçoive un nombre indéfini de rayons, qui en partant du même centre, soient rassemblés dans l’enceinte d’une surface qui passe par les quatre points désignés, ils

448 Kepler describes these comparisons as a function of the eye itself, providing an early version of the theory of natural geometry. When constrained by the aperture of the pupil (αβ), a distant object (θ) casts a narrow breadth of rays (γδ) within the eye. A near object (η) casts a broader array (εζ), Kepler explains that “since the eye grasps the diameter αβ and the depth αγ, and since it is sufficient to observe the ratio δγ to γε and that of each to αβ, either by the attenuation of light, or by the very small illuminated parts of the inner surface, it will consequently observe αη and αθ, not, indeed, by numbering, but by comparing the distances of the object through this habit, as it were, with the powers of its body, and the extension of hands and paces.” Johannes Kepler, Optics: Paralipomena to Witelo & Optical Part of Astronomy, 66. Dana Densmore and William H. Donohue, trans. (Santa Fe, Green Lion Press, 2000).

449 G. N. Cantor, “Berkeley, Reid, and the Mathematization of Mid-Eighteenth-Century Optics,” Journal of the History of Ideas 38, no. 3 (1977): 432-3.

234 formeront un conoïde: c’est dans l’espace de ce conoïde que doivent être renfermés tous les rayons visuels des spectateurs.450

(One draws from this vanishing point four lines—of which one passes under the feet of the actor and the other over his head, and the two others pass by the borders of the stage opening—extending them farther. Then, if one conceives of an indefinite number of rays, which departing from the same center would be gathered within the boundary of a surface that passed through the four designated points, they form a conoid: it is within the space of this conoid that all the spectators’ visual rays should be enclosed.)

The actor in this visual array not only determines the position of spectators and the dimensions of the whole theatrical interior, but also emerges as the stationary, centrally posed object of an abstract spectatorial regard. The writer explains that the actor’s body is a proper keystone for these proportions, since “le personnage est en effet l’objet principal dans une représentation théatrale”451 (the character is indeed the principal object in a theatrical representation). The cone is thus not meant to guarantee the perspective illusion, but to enforce a clear and distinct visual encounter; it provides the theatre architect with a set of guiding construction lines derived from sensory mechanics.

The appearance of conical sightline studies in late eighteenth-century theatre architecture plans not only graphically displays the architectural reduction of spectatorial function to an abstract geometry of sense, it also conforms with a broader practical tendency in French architectural theory of that era. Architects in the late eighteenth- century treated public buildings including theatres with an emphasis on suitability to their designated purpose. Traced spectatorial sightlines displaced geometric construction lines in finished theatre plans, while, within architecture theory the aims of the theatre buildings simultaneously coalesced around the spectator’s sensory encounter with the

450 Anonymous, Exposition des Principes, 21. See also the Architectonographie des Theatres of Donnet, Orgiazi and Kaufmann, in which this description is repeated with only slight modification (84).

451 Ibid., 22.

235 stage. To whatever extent architects modeled the eye when building the visual cone into their plans, the adoption of hashed visual rays speaks to an infiltration of a set of techniques for representing space that already operated within the science of optics.

c. The Triple Stage

The final morphological indicator of an ocular theme in late eighteenth-century theatre architecture is a tendency to divide the stage into three diverging vistas. Ledoux’s plan drawing of the first loges for his theatre at Besançon partitions the upstage region into three segments that, according to the plan, were to be separated by scenic flats (fig.

4.13). A similar device is evident in plans for his theatre at Marseilles in which two diverging alleys retreat towards the upstage left and right corners of the stage.452 Three- part divisions of stage space also appeared in theatre designs by N. M. Potain (1763),

Charles-Nicolas Cochin (1765), Neufforge (1767), and Peyre and De Wailly (1769-

1771). Tripartite stage designs were not solely a French phenomenon; plans by the

Italian architects Casimo Morelli (1780) and Francesco Milizia (1794) also incorporated scenic partitions. The triple stage thus appeared in theatre projects during precisely the years when French theatre architects made explicit appeals to optics, and calls to mind optical diagrams that trace the eye’s reversal of the external visual field along rays that emanate from three evenly spaced visual objects. The structural homology between such stage designs and the optical hieroglyph for visual function replicated by Descartes,

Voltaire and others suggests that the conceptual space of optics came to infiltrate

452 Claude Nicolas Ledoux, Architecture de C.N. Ledoux: Collection qui Rassemble Tous les Genres de Bâtiments Employés dans L’Ordre Social, ed. Daniel Ramée (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1983), 73, 83.

236 architectural representations of the stage.

There are, it must be noted, several historical antecedents to the eighteenth- century triple stage in visual culture and performance traditions that are not overtly linked to optics. The dominant feature of modern European theatre architecture—the proscenium arch—has been genealogically linked to Renaissance public spectacles incorporating the Roman triumphal arch, which was typically comprised of “a large central opening […] usually flanked by two smaller side arches.”453 Triumphal arches were also employed in scenic practices of medieval liturgical drama that were in turn transmitted to the seventeenth-century French stage. The scenic designers of the Hôtel

Bourgogne, for example, constructed mansions on the left and right sides of the stage, creating trios of symbolic settings that could be utilized in turn with no need for scene changes. Though this symbolic practice waned as “illusionistic” Italian perspective decorations were gradually adopted in France, it was precisely the desire to stage multiple loci that architects cited when proposing the triple stage in the late eighteenth century.

After the failure of Sémiramis in 1748, Voltaire decried the presence of spectators on stage and expressed his desire for a stage wide enough to depict separate locations such as the palace façade, temple and tomb called for in his tragedy.454 A similar appeal for a “théâtre très étendu” (very extended stage) that would allow for the depiction of simultaneous action was issued by Diderot in 1757. As Michèle Sajous

D’Oria and Pierre Frantz have observed, several theatre architects invoke Voltaire’s

453 George R. Kernodle, From Art to Theatre, Form and Convention in the Renaissance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1944) 90. Alice Jarrard links public military spectacle to French theatre architecture by way of the architect and engineer Gaspare Vigarani. See Architecture as Performance in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

454 Voltaire, Dissertation sur la tragédie, Œuvres Complètes, vol. 30A, 158.

237 Sémiramis as justification for the tripartite stage.455 Cochin describes his wide oval stage with three diverging stages as “le théâtre de Palladio, appliqué à nos usages” (Palladio’s stage adapted to our use), and mentions the ease with which it would accommodate

Sémiramis.456 De Wailly, likewise, proposes that the triple stage he and Peyre incorporated into their early designs for the Odéon would serve “beaucoup de nos décorations dans lequelles il faut representer differens objets, entr-autres, celle nécessaire

à Sémiramis”457 (many of our decorations within which different objects must be represented; including among others, that called for by Sémiramis).

Historians who have commented on the neoclassicist predilection for three part stage designs have cited either the reaction to Voltaire’s Sémiramis, or the influence of

Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico as primary causes.458 However, there are several reasons to believe that these factors do not entirely account for (nor exhaust the field of meaning generated by) triptychal theatre designs. The triple stage did not unilaterally emerge out of changes in French dramaturgy; both theatre practitioners and theatre architects spoke of constraints imposed by the other’s practice. What’s more, the triple stage was primarily the object of an architectural fascination not shared by actors, scenographers or playwrights.459 Voltaire and Diderot had called for wider stages capable of depicting separate locations but did not necessarily endorse articulated three-part divisions of stage

455 Michèle Sajous D’Oria, Bleu et Or, 131-42; Pierre Frantz and Michèle Sajous D’Oria, Le Siècle des Théâres, 23-4.

456 Cochin, Projet, 1, 18.

457 De Wailly, “Mémoire manuscrit,” BNF MNS. NAF 2479/416.

458 Wendell Cole, “The Triple Stage” Educational Theatre Journal 14, no. 4 (1962): 303; T.E. Lawrenson, “The ideal theatre in the eighteenth century: Paris and Venice” Drama & Mimesis (Cambridge UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980) 51, 55.

459 Ibid., 302.

238 space.460 No triple stages were ultimately realized in French public theatres, moreover, likely owing to the problems the stages would have created for scenic designers.461 The desire to properly stage Voltaire’s play, which garnered a mixed reception, does not fully explain the architectural enthusiasm for the triple stage. Finally, impact of Palladio’s multiple vista stage ought not to be overstated. Cochin and other neoclassicist architects were indeed influenced by Palladio, but their designs resembled the Teatro Olimpico only loosely. Palladio’s diverging perspective alleys are not three, but seven in total, and they do not encompass enough acting space to be considered stages in themselves. The Teatro

Olimpico’s diverging alleys confer the benefits of perspective on a wider swath of the auditorium, but do not support the ability to “representer differens objets.” Thus while the mid-century failure of Sémiramis and the elevation of the Palladian model ought not to be dismissed in accounting for the triple stage, these factors do not exhaust the interpretive possibilities this architecture offers.

The three-part stage manifests the congruence of theatrical and optical representations of space. In both types of image the frontal visual field is mapped across three evenly distributed zones that meet at a threshold dividing internal and external spaces. The structural elements of certain theatrical interiors designed between 1765 and

1784 therefore correspond to those of geometrically-idealized diagrams of the eye’s reversal of optic rays that proliferated during the eighteenth century: a circular chamber

460 Michèle Sajous D’Oria notes that Charles De Wailly met Voltaire in 1771 and reportedly discussed plans for the new Théâtre Français with the philosophe. However, this meeting took place after several iterations of the Théâtre Français with triple stages had already been proposed. D’Oria, Bleu et Or, 135.

461 The author of the Exposition des Principes remarks, “ce partage en trois scènes, si agréable dans certaines occasions, ne peut pas toujours convenir” (“this sharing among three stages, so desireable in certain circumstances, may not always be welcome”) (35). Other critics, including Dard de Bosco, rejected the triple stage as unworkable. See Rabreau, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, 131; Jacque Rittaud-Hutinet, Ledoux et ses Théâtres, 100.

239 opens upward on the page, and the space beyond this aperture conforms to a regular order—left, right and center—that delineates the subject’s visual sweep. Tellingly, the tripartite stage designs that appeared after 1766, when the first mention of physics appeared in a treatise on theatre architecture, tended to evenly divide the stage into three segments. This coincidence further suggests that the tools used to represent theatrical space during the second phase of the reform movement were borrowed directly from the optical tradition.

Whereas triple stages designed by Potain and Cochin in 1763 and 1765 flank a large central stage with two “petits théâtres,” those proposed later by De Wailly and

Ledoux shed this vestige of medieval scenography in favor of a rational, radiating spatial order. They divide the stage more or less evenly, further undermining the monolinear perspective that had classically favored the central place of the king, and mimicking the triple set of visual rays that symbolized the universal faculty of vision in optical diagrams. The homology of ocular and theatrical form legible in these plans thus reflects how late eighteenth century architects constituted the spectator not just as a social entity, but as a set of abstract sensory functions. The triple stage can be read, then, not only to manifest the Enlightenment theatre of vision in all the autonomy granted it by the sensationist doctrine that held sway at mid-century, but to graft the spatial mechanics of vision onto a profound, residual numerical structure rooted in medieval tryptich,

Renaissance optics, and rationalist spatial uniformity.

* * *

240 The morphological convergence between the eye as it was rendered by

Enlightenment optics and certain visionary French theatre designs of the late eighteenth century provides essential context for interpreting Ledoux’s cryptic Coup d’œil engraving. The architect’s “first frame” invocation links the theatrical spectator to the cultivation of a knowing subject by identifying the representational frame of the theatre with that of the mind. For Ledoux the visual/theatrical frame serves to make knowledge of the world possible: “sans ce rayon vivifiant, tout seroit dans l’obscurité pénible et languissante”462 (without this vivifying ray all would be in languid, painful darkness).

The ramifications of identifying theatrical representation with conscious apprehension of the world, however, come to bear not only on theatre history but also on the historical formation of bourgeois subjectivity itself.

As part of a project with a broad historical scope, David Wiles has linked the deployment of stage space in the West to the forging of a disembodied Cartesian subject:

The corollary of Cartesian space was, eventually, the retreat of the actor into a frame. If the authentic homuncular ego is already peering out at the action through the cornea, then it makes sense to gaze in at the stage performance through another focalizing lens created by a proscenium arch.463

In this way Wiles explains what he calls the “ocular” nature of modern theatre by depicting a pervasive “Cartesian theatrical dichotomy” and by analogizing the division enforced by the proscenium arch to Descartes’ absolute distinction between mind and body—the mythical Cartesian Dualism. The insight that the history of theatre architecture, which is comprised of the manifold conceptual, practical and experiential spaces that suffuse performance, is linked to the development of modern philosophy is a

462 Ledoux, 373.

463 Wiles, 7.

241 central premise of my study. However, the historical particulars that surround the conjugation of theatrical and ocular space during the late French Enlightenment challenge

Wiles’ reading of modern Western performance space as much as they affirm the fundamental premises and direction of his argument.

Wiles’ characterization of Descartes’ theory of personhood hews to a common but misleading notion that the philosopher held all consciousness to be immaterial and ontologically distinct from the body. As Gordon Baker and Katherine J. Morris have argued, this rendition of Cartesian Dualism belies Descartes’ understanding of the body as a sentient, feeling, reacting machine.464 Though for Descartes’ the immortal soul enabled the human capacity for reason, the body’s material senses contributed mightily to conscious inner life. Beyond this reduction of Descartes’ metaphysics to a crude dualism

(a wrong of which Lefebvre and many others are also culpable), Wiles collapses a variety of intellectual formations that contributed to the ocularity of theatre architecture, blurring them into a monolithic epochal Cartesianism and obscuring the roles that empiricism and materialism played in drawing the spaces of optics and theatre together in the late

Enlightenment.

In keeping with Lefebvre’s condemnation of Cartesian abstract space, Wiles links the frontal picture frame of proscenium theatre architecture with a legacy of sight- oriented power relations: “Cartesian space is an ocular space. The invisible ego not only views the action but also quells the actors with the controlling power of its gaze.”465 The manifest ocularity of theatre spaces, however, emerged in France decades after the

464 Gordon Baker and Katherine J. Smith, Descartes’ Dualism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 8, 60-100.

465 Wiles, 7.

242 influence of Cartesian rationalism had subsided. In the Preliminary Discourse to his

Traité de Dynamique, D’Alembert described the Cartesians as a “secte qui à la vérité n’existe presque plus aujourd’hui”466 (sect which in truth almost no longer exists today).

In 1759, the year after D’Alembert’s comment was printed in the Mercure de France, spectators were banned from sitting on stage at the Comédie-Française. If, as Wiles suggests, the “retreat of the actor into a frame” was indeed the result of a pervasive

Cartesian conceptual space, then one must wonder why in France the architectural separation between spectator and stage was not enforced until Cartesianism was held in comparatively low regard.

Two considerations of French late-Enlightenment theatre design help correct

Wiles’ broad account of the evolution of modern performance space. First, it is important to distinguish the vision-centric metaphysics of seventeenth-century Cartesian rationalism, which incorporates the abstract space of optical science and which has been often linked to a domineering tendency in modern Western epistemology,467 from the ocularity of the theatre designs I examine in this chapter, which was an architectural biomorphism that entailed the merger of theatrical and optical space. The latter phenomenon, though it could not have emerged as such without the prioritization of optics by seventeenth-century natural philosophy, was also the result of an epistemological shift away from the supposed a priori foundations of Cartesianism toward a greater esteem of sense’s role in forming knowledge. D’Alembert and Diderot, like Condillac and La Mettrie, subscribed to more or less stringent versions of

466 Mercure de France, August 1758, 110.

467 See, for example, Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity” in Vision and Visuality, Hal Foster ed., (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 3-28.

243 philosophical materialism, which held that, as Foucault puts it, “knowledge has anatomo- physiological conditions, […] that its forms cannot be dissociated from its peculiar functioning.”468 This materialist view of the soul in part motivated a turn to experimental physics in theatre architecture reform, and recommended the application of “optical and acoustical forms” in designs by Patte and Ledoux.

Secondly, a distinctly post-Cartesian concept of knowledge production can also help explain both the ocular theme and the 1759 edict prohibiting on-stage banquets. The institutional separation of salle and scène was not so much a necessary result of—nor an architectural analogy for—the Cartesian dichotomy of res cogitans and res extensa so much as it followed from the displacement in France of the rationalist primacy of reason and espousal of innate ideas by Lockean empiricism and a Newtonian scientific procedure, both of which encountered objects of knowledge as discrete. The proscenium frame no longer simply marked an academic conceptual distinction between the fictive world of the stage and the factual world of the spectator; it also helped to constitute theatrical ‘objects’ by delineating a zone of representation bounded by a visually apparent frame rather than by a conceptual distinction. The theatrical practice outlined by

D’Aubignac, which espoused the rational foundation of seventeenth-century Cartesian philosophy and strenuously argued against confusing the Mondes particulier of the theatre with the grand Monde of facts, tolerated the presence of spectators on stage, whereas the mid-eighteenth century demanded a rigid separation.

One explanation for this paradox may lie in the notion that the proscenium frame aided in drawing the boundaries of theatrical objects within an intellectual climate

468 Foucault, The Order of Things, 319.

244 dominated by an empiricism that could not account, on its own, for the unity of objects, nor—by direct consequence—for the unity of cognition. Before Kant’s attempt to synthesize concepts with intuitions derived from sensory perceptions, theories of knowledge slanted towards grounding all knowledge in modifications of sense impressions struggled to account for the unity of objects of cognition. Late French

Enlightenment psychology, indebted as it was to Lockean empiricism, made no account of object unity. Thus, to the extent that, as I contend, theatrical representation modeled the mind’s relationship to the world for mid-century French intellectuals, the structural integrity of the proscenium frame allowed it to serve as a kind of psychological prosthesis. The architectural frame shored up the unity of theatrical objects—a unity for which a priori academic justification was no longer tenable.

Thus, to return to a line of analysis I pursued in my first chapter, the proscenium frame in eighteenth-century France came to be compared to a window: an architectural frame that opened onto and unified a discrete and singular aspect of the world. We have seen that Diderot mentioned climbing through a window when witnessing Dorval’s play in the Entretiens sur le fils naturel. Ledoux, tellingly, repeated this association in his essays on theatre architecture. For Ledoux, the forestage is “l’embrâsure de la croisée,” or the depth of an opening in a wall made for a door or window.469 Later, the architect repeats this comparison as he refutes critics who argue that his extra wide proscenium will make the actors look too small by comparison: “Quand vouz ouvrez le croisée de votre appartement craignez-vous que les objets que vous appercevez ne soient trop

469 Ledoux, 380.

245 petits”470 (When you open the threshold to your apartment, do you fear that the objects you perceive are too small)? The proscenium arch no longer offered just visual access to an illusory realm of appearances, but an opening onto a veritable segment of the real.

This window frame comparison, read in the context of the eighteenth-century aesthetic of tableau, further illuminates the theatre’s architectural frame usefulness for bourgeois spectators. The proscenium arch not only focused the spectator’s eyes towards the stage as part of a larger program of disciplining audience behavior, it also shored up the coherence of subjective cognition that had become identified with the spectatorial gaze since the turn of the century. The proscenium arch, like the private window of a chambre à coucher, granted coherence and uniqueness to an individual regard. As Pierre

Frantz points out, pictorial tableau was compared to the function of a window in the

Encyclopédie: “en séparant les tableaux des objets voisins, réunir mieux entre elles les parties dont ils sont composés, à peu près comme il paraît qu’une fenêtre rassemble les différents objets qu’on voit par son ouverture”471 (separating the tableaux from neighboring objects, better uniting between them the parts of which they are composed, not unlike the way it seems that a window gathers together the different objects that one sees through its opening). As much as the window frame—and the comparable frames of painting and theatre—offered coherence to the spectatorial regard, it also conferred uniqueness and individuality. Mercier reveals the window’s function in cultivating a reflexive bourgeois interiority in the 1784 Mon bonnet de nuit. Of the chamber window he happens to enjoy during a weeklong stay in Neuchâtel, the dramatist writes

470 Ibid, 381.

471 Chevalier de Jaucourt, “Tableau,” Encyclopédie, 15:804. See Frantz, L’esthétique du tableau, 43.

246 Il faut à l’homme qui écrit, un emplacement agréable, un point de vue qui intéresse à la fois son œil et son imagination. Le hasard m’a mieux servi que le choix le plus difficile : ma fenêtre me présente en perspective les tableaux les plus magnifiques de la nature et ses grands monuments. Un horizon immense est sous mes regards, et la chaîne majestueuse des Alpes en ceint le contour.

[…]

C’est pour moi que le soleil en se levant dore ces hautes montagnes ; c’est pour moi qu’à son coucher elles sont illuminées d’un feu rouge et vif.472

(A man who writes ought to have an agreeable placement and a point of view that at once interests his eye and his imagination. Chance has served me better than the most difficult choice: my window presents to me, in perspective, the most magnificent pictures of nature and its great monuments. An immense horizon is under my gaze, the majestic Alpine range surrounds its contour.

[…]

It is for me that the rising sun plates these high mountains in gold; it is for me that at its setting they are illuminated by a vibrant red fire.)

Mercier’s private window bounds a perspective that is private and utterly unique. His view is granted haphazardly—the same way that Marivaux described the occurrence of thoughts in his Spectateur Français—yet it is utterly unique and personal. The perspective picture of his window transforms the sunrise and sunset into a private spectacle.

The traffic in concepts and discourse between natural philosophy and theatre, in other words, well exceeded the boundaries of strictly philosophical texts. Indeed, the materialism espoused by many mid-century philosophers narrowed the gap between theories of representation proper to epistemology and theatre: Condillac held that external objects produced ideas in the mind that resembled the objects themselves, though no

472 Louis-Sébastien Louis Mercier, “Ma fenêtre,” Mon bonnet de nuit: Suivi de Du théâtre (Paris: Mercure de France, 1999), 572-3.

247 extra-sensory evidence could demonstrate this relationship.473 Sense-borne ideas presumably imitated the external world according to a possibly corrupt mimetic function with no absolute purchase on objects in themselves. Together, this contested mimetic function, a prevalent Lockean sensationism, and a post-Newtonian premium on discrete objects for scientific consideration molded the conditions of knowing the natural world into a quasi-theatrical structure.

This philosophical development, judging by architectural plans and treatises, as well as by a broader examination of print culture in France, was reflected in the absorption of optics by theatre architecture and manifested in a gathering and unifying function thought to adhere to the proscenium arch. The architectural frame of theatrical representation, according to theorists and architects in the second half of the eighteenth century, offered a means of forging a coherent stage picture that stood for an enlightened regard of the world itself. Thus the aestheticized coup d’œil that Mercier and Jaucourt describe provides an inverse counterpoint to the spectatorial regard depicted in reformist theatre designs. Each subjective moment reflects an individual for whom the world is knowable only in segments, and only through a representational frame.

473 George Berkeley, in the 1710 Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, had issued an idealist critique of Locke and others who claimed to know the external world on the basis of sense data, but this did not prevent Condillac and others from arguing that the senses offered proof of the world’s existence. See Cassirer, 117-8.

248 EPILOGUE

In his study of performance space in the West, David Wiles submits that analysis of performance space not only entails a consideration of the history of space in general, but also bears ramifications for the wider history of Western thought. The space of theatrical performance does not merely enclose a representation absolutely divorced from the factual world and supported by transitory material conditions. Rather, as Wiles suggests, performance space reflects the historically specific conditions of knowledge itself, and engages the historico-philosophical conundrum of the development of the

“knowing subject” taken up by Bourdieu, Foucault and others.474 The preceding chapters have addressed dramatic theory, experimental physics and the history of philosophy in eighteenth-century France in order to bring the mimetic relationship between theatre and philosophical articulations of consciousness into relief. As I have stated previously, the historical object I have in view is the mutual approximation of the Enlightenment subject’s encounter with the natural world—the paradigmatic structure of early modern philosophy—and the spectator’s encounter with the objects of theatrical representation. I have thus attempted to transform the material of theatre history into an argument that extends to the level of the history of knowledge production.

The relationship between the stage and auditorium has been recognized as a model of the mind’s relationship with objects of knowledge from the time of Camillo’s

Memory Theatre to the mise-en-scène of reduction at the center of Husserl’s

474 David Wiles, Western Performance Space, 3.

249 phenomenology.475 Since one finds the alignment of theatrical and epistemic structures to emerge in mid-sixteenth century Western Europe, to permeate theatre architecture and sensationist philosophy in eighteenth-century France, and to haunt twentieth-century phenomenology, it is reasonable to call this intellectual condition a hallmark of a distinctly modern theatricality of knowledge. Thus the 1804 engraving that Daniel

Rabreau has called Ledoux’s “ocular rebus” may be read as an emblem for the discursive and conceptual traffic sustained between theatre and epistemology in eighteenth-century

France.476 It remains to make an account of this theatricality’s emergence, and to outline what its historically produced attributes portend for the legacy of theatre in the post-

Enlightenment age.

Ledoux’s conjugation of theatre architecture and ocular anatomy refers to the conformity of theatre architecture’s representation of space with an abstract space refined within optics and, by extension, the broader domain of natural philosophy in late-

Enlightenment France. Clearly, a mutually referential relationship was sustained between theatrical representation and philosophy in the mid-eighteenth century. During the period of France’s theatre architecture reform movement, natural history, natural philosophy, and political life were subjected to a spectatorial regard—an “optique du théâtre”—that closely observed discrete phenomena with an emphasis on sense-based knowledge.

Dramatic theory and theatre architecture theory meanwhile adopted the sensationist language of “objects” of theatrical representation and manifested a heightened attention

475 For my explication of the theatrical architectonics of Husserlian phenomenology, see Pannill Camp, “Theatre Optics: Enlightenment Theatre Architecture in France and the Architectonics of Husserl’s Phenomenology,” Theatre Journal 59 (2007), 615-33.

476 Rabreau, ibid., 144.

250 to the sensory mechanics that mediated between these objects and the mind of the spectator. All this implies not only that both dramatic theory and theatre architecture responded to prevailing notions of the conditions of human knowledge, but also that scientific knowledge, and the theories of human understanding that supported it, came to incorporate a representational structure akin to theatrical mimesis. The aesthetic protocols of theatre, to say nothing of other visual arts, therefore ought not to be summarily deemed epiphenomena of the autonomous development of philosophical history. Theatre and other aesthetic pursuits provided Enlightenment philosophy with a model of representation that helped account for the irreducibly mediate appearances that made up the world; theatre architecture left an indelible mark on later attempts to articulate the structure of consciousness.

The relationship between theatre and philosophy involved a dynamic, reciprocal accommodation. As experimental philosophy adopted the theatrical protocols and logistics of rehearsal, staging, and spectatorial traffic, theatrical innovators tasked the stage with representing the world concretely and truthfully. In promoting an exacting yet restricted model of representation, Diderot pressed for contemporary, bourgeois situations to serve as the objects of a theatre practice so life-like that it bid the spectator to jump up and “d’ajouter un personnage réel à la scène” (E 85). Diderot’s Entretiens sur le fils naturel, as I noted in my first chapter, implies that the theatrical image cannot fully identify with its real world object. The mortality of Dorval’s father acts to limit the otherwise perfect identification of art and life. Thus, both sensationist epistemology and dramatic theory asserted a mimetic relationship between their respective conjurations and the objective world, and each representation was called into question by a formidable

251 theoretical limit. Sense-based ideas of external objects could no more be proven to reflect the world as it was than Diderot’s dramas could be expected to provide perfect copies of actual states of affairs.

Furthermore, the materialism espoused by many mid-century philosophers narrowed the gap between theories of representation operative within epistemology and theatre: Condillac held that external objects produced ideas in the mind that resembled external objects, though no extra-sensory evidence could confirm this relationship.477

Sense-borne ideas presumably imitated the external world according to a potentially corrupt mimetic function with no absolute purchase on objects in themselves. Together, this contested mimetic function, a prevalent Lockean sensationism, and a post-Newtonian premium on discrete objects of scientific inquiry molded the conditions of knowing the natural world into a quasi-theatrical structure. An irreducible representational function inhabited natural philosophy throughout the eighteenth century, and was in fact one component of the scandal of knowledge Kant attempted to redress in his first critique.

The alignment of theatrical and philosophical frames was therefore propelled by the spread of empiricist psychology, which necessarily incorporated a representational function in its account of human knowledge. In the absence of innate ideas, all knowledge of the external world was necessarily mediate. But this alignment was not only the result of an epistemological problem; theatrical framing conferred advantages on the project of natural philosophy that were object-oriented in the sense of promoting the practical ends of scientific discovery. That is to say that the theatrical frame amounted to

477 George Berkeley, in his 1710 Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, had issued an idealist critique of Locke and others who claimed to know the external world on the basis of sense data, but this did not prevent Condillac and others from arguing that the senses offered proof of the world’s existence. See Cassirer, supra., 117-8.

252 a powerful technique capable of isolating discrete segments of the observable world.478

Newton famously claimed to eschew universal hypotheses in experimental philosophy, preferring to explain individual phenomena through “experiment and reason.”479 As a result of the widespread acceptance of Newtonian science in France, it became a popular credo within the high French Enlightenment to reject all-encompassing hypothetical rationalist systems like those of Descartes, in favor of scientific knowledge grounded in sense-experience, and cultivate from closely observed, modestly circumscribed experimental investigations.

Newtonian natural philosophy was renowned in eighteenth-century France for having made nature transparent to reason through mathematics, as well as for submitting universal hypotheses concerning nature to the examination of discrete phenomena. In order to illustrate this latter facet of Newtonian thought, one has only to consider the concept in classical mechanics of inertial frames, which apply a nullifying function to motion outside of a particular frame of reference. Newtonian inertial frames bracket absolute space.480 In order to mathematize the mechanical interaction of a set of billiard balls, for example, it is necessary to suspend calculations of the earth’s orbit and gradual rotation. In other words, Newtonian laws and method employed a technique of separation and isolation of discrete spatiotemporal domains—a technique of which the designation of theatrical “Mondes particulières” in French dramaturgy offered an

478 Bernard Stiegler comments at the opening of his Technics and Time that Western philosophy begins with the separation of tekhne from episteme. See Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1.

479 Alexandre Koyré, Newtonian Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 25.

480 The notion of the inertial frame was not described as such by Newton, but was recognized and retroactively applied to classical mechanics by James Thompson. See Robert DiSalle, “Conventionalism and the Origins of the Inertial Frames Concept,” Philosophy of Science Association, v. 2 (1991) 139-47.

253 applicable model. Newton’s inertial frames bear formal similarities with the conceptual technique of framing spatio-temporal relations rationalized by D’Aubignac, who described the stage as “an individual world, where everything is contained in the notion of the reach of the action represented, and which has no contact at all with the greater world, except insofar as it finds itself attached to it by an understanding that the poet declares.”481 In both classical mechanics and classical French dramaturgy, the very knowability of a discrete object depends upon making the greater world outside of a certain frame dispositional. Propositions concerning the “grande Monde” are suspended in favor of isolated, particular experimental proofs.

This technique of suspending cognition of states of affairs outside of a frame of reference is an important component of my thesis concerning the theatricality of knowledge production because it reveals an inversion of the relationship between the function of knowledge production within natural philosophy and the technique of theatrical framing. For mid-seventeenth century French dramaturgy, the “Mondes particulières” of the stage were explicitly set apart from the factual states of affairs and deemed to be depictions of what was not the case, or what D’Aubignac calls “tout ce qui n’est point.” These discrete theatrical worlds, however, were prevented from mixing with the world of facts by virtue of an absolute rational distinction—their status as non- fact was a matter of epistemic necessity. The demarcation of extra-factual representations as such shored up knowledge of the world outside such representations.

I contend that the Newtonian experimental method, along with the empiricist psychology of Locke, helped proliferate a technique of thought that overturned this

481 D’Aubignac, 200-1.

254 distinction in favor of an instrumental parcelling of nature. The Newtonian inertial frame similarly set the domain of individual experiments apart from the world at large, but on technical, rather than epistemic grounds. For experimental physics the world outside of the experimental frame of reference was temporarily put out-of-action, its constituent propositions made dispositional. Systematic theories of nature and universal hypotheses were held in abeyance so that discrete natural phenomena could be examined, quantified, and transmuted into useful knowledge. To the extent that this cognitive technique infiltrated dramatic theory in eighteenth-century France, it inverted the status of the representation within the theatrical frame. The theatrical frame offered Enlightenment savants a means of cordoning off discrete worlds, but as the theatrical frame lent itself to experimental use, it increasingly connoted the binding element of an experimental function that produced natural philosophical knowledge, rather than the boundary line for counter-factual representations. In its experimental application, the conceptual frame around a discrete representation ceased to mark the limit within which appearances were illusory, and became the guarantee of specific, verifiable knowledge.

What is more, the versatility of this conceptual frame suggests that the advent of

Diderot’s bourgeois drama is one consequence of the instrumentalization of reason witnessed by French Enlightenment. The application of discrete framing to scientific knowledge production, the insistence among late Enlightenment philosophers that usefulness be an essential criterion of knowledge, and the debasement of baroque rationalist systems transformed theatrical framing into a tool that could produce the truth of nature, rather than obscure it. Once the experimental use of the theatrical frame was actualized, this truth-making function adhered to it and was cross-applied to self-

255 consciously theatrical venues. So it was that Diderot urged in 1757 that theatrical spectacle ground itself in concrete reality, just as natural philosophy had done in heeding

Newton and Locke. So it was also that the theatre became the proper locus of revealing the truth to the social body, as Mercier insisted that it must:

Le spectacle est un mensonge ; il s’agit de le rapprocher de la plus grande vérité. Le spectacle est un tableau ; il s’agit de rendre ce tableau utile, c’est-à-dire de le mettre à la portée du plus grand nombre, afin que l’image qu’il présentera serve à lier entre eux les hommes par le sentiment victorieux de la compassion et de la pitie.482

(The theatre is a lie; it is a matter of drawing it towards the greatest truth; the theatre is a picture; it is a matter of making this picture useful, which is to say of putting it within reach of the greatest number, to the end that the image it will present serves to link men together through the triumphant sentiment of compassion and of pity.)

The application of conceptual framing and other tools of mise-en-scène to natural philosophy, however, amounted to a forceful philosophical method, one that embraced technical utility over the metaphysical ground of rationalist philosophy. This preference was concomitant with a shift in emphasis from the contemplative, reflective aspects of seventeenth-century natural science to a more direct, demonstrative and transparent method. The transparency of experimentation, however, was seen to involve a measure of violence against nature. Nollet compares the contemplative and observational methods of natural history with the procedures of experimental physics thusly: “Par le première, on épie pour ainsi dire la Nature à dessein de lui surprendre son secret; par le seconde, on lui fait violence pour la forcer à le dire”483 (By the first, one spies on nature in a manner of speaking with the aim of overhearing her secret; by the second, one does violence to

482 Mercier, Du théâtre, 1141.

483 Nollet, Oratio, 24-5.

256 her to force her to tell it). Such a characterization bolsters Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of Enlightenment as elevating reason to the status of myth, even as it reduces reason to an instrument employed, at times, in utterly irrational ways. The shift in reason’s vocation from the contemplative exploration of knowledge’s metaphysical foundations to a technique for the mastery of nature places the abstraction and separation of subject and object at the heart of the dialectical development of reason:

Of course, mental representation is only an instrument. In thought, human beings distance themselves from nature in order to arrange it in such a way that it can be mastered. Like the material tool which, as a thing, is held fast as that thing in different situations and thereby separates the world, as something chaotic, multiple, and disparate, from that which is known, single, and identical, so the concept is the idea-tool which fits into things at the very point from which one can take hold of them. Thought thus becomes illusory whenever it seeks to deny its function of separating, distancing, and objectifying.484

The notion of thought’s potential as a tool, something that may be submitted to non-rational ends, is routinely invoked to make sense of the Enlightenment’s fraught historical legacy. However historians of Enlightenment-era theatre, in keeping with the blithely positive attitude of most theatre scholarship towards its object, have resisted directing the critique of Enlightenment as the instrumentalization of reason towards the techniques of thought circulated between drama and natural philosophy. Yet, in the reformulation of dramatic theory that unfolded between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France, theatrical representation, no less than the mental representation of which it was a material avatar, participated in the abstraction of a universal subject, and regulated the distance at which the world’s constituent objects were represented to this subject. In other words, it is disingenuous to exempt the theatrical component of

484 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 31.

257 eighteenth-century French theatre from the critique of Enlightenment. The theatrical techniques of framing, separating and abstracting taken up by experimental method underwent modifications that overhauled the understanding of theatre’s relationship to the world. In this process, Diderot and his dramatic cohort laid the ideological groundwork for treating theatre as a laboratory of ideas—a notion that did not fully mature until the late nineteenth-century under the banner of naturalism.

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