Denis Diderot, the eighteenth-century French philosopher who also took a special interest in theatre, gave the following instruction to stage actors: ‘Don't think about the spectator anymore, act as if he doesn't even exist. Imagine there is a big wall at the edge of the stage separating you from the parterre. Act as if the curtain was never raised’ (1970: 453). In all the theatre theory that was to follow, this imaginary wall was known as the ‘fourth wall’. Diderot writes this at a time when both the theory and practice of theatre and drama in France – and elsewhere – are subject to profound changes. He develops a different idea about theatrical credibility and ‘naturalness’ – an idea which, as I will try to demonstrate in this paper, reaches much further than the stage and the theatre venue. An idea about politics not as a spectacle but as a democratic event which, in ancien régime France, for the time being exists only in theory. This new type of theatre, by contrast, is already coming into being in practice.

The Debate on Citizenship for Actors

In December 1789, a remarkable debate takes place in the Assemblée, the provisional parliament governing revolutionary France (Friedland 2002: 3ff.). The representatives in this assembly are discussing the question of whether the right to vote should be given to ‘actors, hangmen and Jews’. The people's delegates rapidly reach consensus on voting rights for hangmen, perhaps because Robespierre already foresees he will need them in a few years’ time, but the discussion regarding the actors is very lively. During the debate in the Assemblée, pamphlets circulate expressing abhorrence at the notion of allowing actors citizen's rights. The English observer Edmund Burke, a notorious conservative, probably gives the most accurate account of the motives for this fear when he suggests that the French Revolution is an illegal political theatre performance: ‘[The representatives of the Assemblée] act like the comedians of a fair before a riotous audience; they act amidst the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of ferocious men, and of women lost to shame…’ (quoted in Buckley 2006: 72).