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Article Excerpt
What must that virtue be which will not stand a trial?
Samuel Richardson, Clarissa
In the tense summer of 1793 in France, a dramatic adaptation of Samuel Richardson's popular sentimental novel, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), took the stage at the Comedie-Francaise. Despite the play's popular reception, the author, director, and actors of the play were jailed by Maximilien Robespierre's Committee for Public Safety for "lack of civic virtue" and "insulting the patriots of the Republic" following its ninth performance on 2 September 1793. (1) The accusation was raised by a single spectator at the theater that night, a soldier named Jullien de Carentan, during a monologue on the virtues of religious tolerance which Carentan understood as a veiled plea for political moderatism. During the hearing that followed three weeks later, the author of the play, Francois de Neufchateau, had a 55-page apology read to the National Convention. In it, Neufchateau defended himself against the claims of "incivisme" by appealing to his service as a member of the National Convention, the very body of law and justice he now faced as an accused. (2) He also appealed, more remarkably, to the conventions--both moral and narrative--of sentimental fiction: pleading his case to the deputies, Neufchateau exclaimed, "Such is virtue's fate; she suffers, she is outraged. But she triumphs!" (3) Casting himself in the role of "persecuted innocent," Neufchateau identifies himself with his heroine, defending the purity of his heart and the virtue of his play, and at one point claims that it is "a play of which I can say: mothers will recommend its reading to their daughters" (AP 74: 626). (4) Despite the hearing, Neufchateau and the actors languished in prison eleven months without trial, only narrowly escaping the guillotine, and thus an ending more along the lines of Richardson's Clarissa (virtue sacrificed) than Pamela (virtue rewarded). (5)
Accounts of the events surrounding the closing of Pamela generally accept that the Jacobins used the outcry of Carentan as a convenient excuse to bring down their remaining opposition, the Girondins, and their mouthpiece. This interpretation does not account, however, for the fact that the play, following an earlier outcry over its "immoral" ending, had in fact been vetted and approved by the Committee for Public Safety three days before reopening on 2 September 1793. The version of the play Carentan saw that night was a new and republicanly-improved edit of Pamela that had received the nihil obstat of the Committee members. Why then was there such concern over a relatively innocuous sentimental comedy of domestic virtue? There was no open insult or expression of counterrevolutionary sentiments in the play, yet the Jacobin-led government treated its performance as an affair of state.
A closer look at the offending lines, and the whole range of accusations leveled against the play from its first to its last performance, reveals the central concern to be one of virtue. It is continuously to virtue, and the play's distortion or lack thereof, that the attacks in the newspapers and in the various speeches at the National Convention and Jacobin Club return. It is my contention that the larger debate and outrage set in motion by Pamela was over the vexing problem of virtue's performance, not only on the theatrical stage but for citizens of France more generally. The 1789 Revolution had opened the public sphere to all active citizens who were now required not only to invoke virtue, but to perform it and embody it publicly. As a result, virtue's performance came under especially intense regulation, scrutiny, and censorship. As the leading "school of virtue," the theater served an important function in the reproduction of revolutionary ideology by inculcating virtue and promoting public spirit (civisme). After an initial liberty following the decree of 13 January 1791 that ended the monopoly on the classical repertoire, the theater came increasingly under the purview of the state and its controls. The textual production surrounding the events leading up to and including the arrest and hearing of Neufchateau--theater reviews, newspaper reports, political speeches, legal decrees, and textual edits to the play--provides a nexus of debate over what constituted virtue and its correct performance at this time. The question was not only what constitutes virtue, but more pressingly, how to recognize virtue. What are its signs and conventions? How to distinguish virtuous citizens from conspirators in our midst?
The case of Pamela serves as a point of entry into a larger discussion of virtue and its transformation over the course of the late eighteenth century from a universal sentiment uniting humanity--typified by Richardson's novel--to a national and civic imperative during the years of Revolution. The sentimental novels of Richardson had played a key role in the revaluation of virtue at mid-century; by 1793, however, the parameters of what constituted virtue--and its legitimate trials and proof--had changed significantly. Rather than the burden of proof resting with the prosecutors in this case--as in most cases during the Terror--the trial of Pamela hinged on Neufchateau's ability to prove his innocence, which is to say, his unblemished civic virtue. Neufchateau was not presumed innocent, as per his rights proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789); rather, the Terror reversed the order of justice in demanding proofs of innocence. Innocence was not understood as merely "not guilty" of particular acts, but referred to a Rousseauian notion of innocence of heart and soul; that is, of the natural virtue associated with the "people" who always had the public good at heart. (6) Such an innocence cannot be proven, however, since words and signs can be false. Innocence was not about a deed or misdeed in the case of Pamela (especially as the rule of law ceded to the rule of virtue under the Terror), but was about one's person, as it was in the trial of Louis XVI who was deemed himself a crime: "The monarchy is not a king, it is crime; the Republic is not a senate, it is virtue." (7)
Once virtue was dissociated from actions, virtuous acts could be hypocritical and great crimes could be virtuous. (8) How then could citizens distinguish the vicious from the virtuous? How discern enemies from allies, especially when hypocrites, schemers, and intriguers also wore the mask of virtue (as Robespierre explained, "hypocrisy renders homage to virtue, by adopting its forms and stammering its language")? (9) At the crucial turning point of 1793, only weeks before Terror would be officially declared the order of the day, and as national security was most threatened by foreign forces, the need to distinguish enemies from patriots was tantamount to the future of the Republic. This was such a pressing yet difficult question for the Jacobins that Robespierre attempted to create a guide by which to judge virtue. According to him, any excess--whether in language, appearance or behavior--was a sign of hypocrisy and false zeal and was to be condemned. (10) A sure sign of vice was, "When a man is silent at a moment when he should speak out.... When he lurks in the shadows or shows a fleeting energy soon gone; when he confines himself to empty tirades against tyrants, paying no heed to public morality and the happiness of all his fellow citizens." (11) Also suspect would be those who dreaded public notice (formerly a virtue), those who only sacrificed aristocrats for form's sake, and who mouthed commonplaces against Pitt and Cobourg.
Robespierre's lists reveal the extreme policing of appearances enforced by the revolutionaries, as well as the important role of performance in the determination of citizens' virtue. Many of Robespierre's entries read more like actors' manuals or Lavater's Physiognomy (1775) than political judgment, and point to the problem of representation, both political and theatrical, at the core of public life during the Terror. It was necessary for citizens and their representatives not only to be virtuous but to appear virtuous as well. As one revolutionary newspaper, Decade philosophique, expressed: "Public man is on a stage where from all sides he is observed by curious gazes, and where it is not enough to be virtuous, one has to appear virtuous." (12) To be a patriot and citizen above suspicion was to display one's "pure and proven virtue" continuously to the eyes of others. (13) Such an emphasis on virtue's appearance, however, created uncertainty over the line between the natural and the theatrical. Did a citizen's virtue appear naturally, as the emanation of a pure heart, or was it the mask of virtue worn by those who would suborn the moral order of the Revolution? Marie-Helene Huet and others have persuasively argued that the Terror was as much a war against representation as it was against foreign and civil enemies, illuminating in particular the way in which "purity" was opposed to the most serious form of treason--that which stemmed from language itself. (14) "Once words had become crimes against the state," wrote Camille Desmoulins describing Robespierre's politics of terror in Le Vieux Cordelier (15 December 1793), "it was only one step to turn into crimes mere looks, sadness, compassion, sighs, even silence." (15) The Jacobin desire to read into the hearts of their compatriots led paradoxically back to the surface--to the signs and conventions by which virtue, and vice, could be recognized. The demand for an adequation between being and appearing posed an impossible and dangerous political imperative. The admissible proof and evidence of one's virtue--abstract, intentionally vague, and changing with the political tide--became a...
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