5 A School of Morals?
TheEncyclopaedia or, to give it its full alternative title, The Systematic
Dictionary of the Arts, Sciences and Crafts, stands as the greatest monument
to the French Enlightenment. It is a systemised, catalogued summary of
human knowledge, guided by reason, which stretches in its completed
form to a colossal 20,000,000 words. The Encyclopaedia boasted a number
of well-known contributors, including Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu,
Diderot and D’Alembert. Of these, Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot were,
amongst other things, philosophers and playwrights. Voltaire’s plays,
although now virtually unknown to English-speaking audiences, were
enormously successful in his time–and were praised to the skies, not
least by Voltaire himself. Rousseau was better known as a writer of operas
(both music and libretti), but he was also a moderately successful play-
wright, as was Diderot.^1
Given this star-studded setting, the huge public spat over the ethics of
the theatre that followed the publication of an article in theEncyclopaedia
in 1757 is surprising.^2 For one thing, the author of the catalyst article
was D’Alembert–not a playwright, but primarily a mathematician and
philosopher (also, for some time, a coeditor of the project, with Diderot).
For another thing, the article concerned had ostensibly nothing at all to
do with theatre–its subject was Geneva,‘situated on two hills at the
end of the lake which today bears its name but which was formerly called
Lake Leman’.^3 Thefinal surprise was who took issue with this article and
chose to register his objections the following year, in no uncertain terms:
none other than the playwright, philosopher and erstwhileEncyclopaedia
contributor, J-J. Rousseau. What had irked Rousseau the most, as a
proud citizen of Geneva, was the suggestion, so brief one would scarcely
notice it, that Geneva might benefit from the construction of a theatre,
albeit strictly regulated to avoid moral corruption:
in this way, Geneva would have the theatre and morals and would enjoy the
advantages of both; the theatrical performances would form the taste of the
citizens and would give them afineness of tact, a delicacy of sentiments, which
is very difficult to acquire without the help of theatrical performances.^4