ON the title page of La Littérature renversée, ou L’Art de faire des pièces de théâtre sans paroles (1775), the anonymous author claimed that the art of performing theatrical works without speech was useful (utile) to playwrights. This author was Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret, a prolific Grub Street writer who published, between 1760 and 1789, some forty-seven books of sundry genres – parodies, poems, elegies, banter, histories, letters, memoirs, odes, tableaux, songs (chants), tales, anecdotes, comedies, pantomimes, domestic dramas, operatic libretti, travel literatures, and almanacs/chronicles of spectacles performed at the fairground and the boulevard theaters in Paris. Although he apparently published these works for a wide range of readers, he referenced core Enlightenment ideas in some of them. His point about “useful” pantomime in La Littérature renversée, for example, came from Rousseau, for he and his co-author Nicolas-Edme Retif de La Bretonne had referenced in their Le Mimographe (1770) the utility of spectacles that Rousseau had discussed in Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles (1758). Yet Nougaret furthered Rousseau's claim by arguing that gesture could at times replace speech not only at the theater, but also in everyday life: if actors who had pronunciation issues – stutterers, those who spoke with a nasal voice, or those from the provinces – could use their bodies as substitutes for their faulty voices, then married couples could also argue silently at home by using gestures.

Whether or not Nougaret believed that gesture could really replace speech in daily settings, his suggestion was grounded in a basic belief – shared by Dubos, Rousseau, Diderot, Condillac, and others – that gestures could function as signs for interpersonal communication, but what was new was that he introduced the theme of equality to the discourse of signification. By calling pantomime a “reversed” literature, Nougaret adopted the theme of reversal pervasive in eighteenth-century culture (e.g., Lesage and Jacques-Philippe d’Orneval's Le Monde renversé (1721)) and saw in pantomime a possibility to rethink the hierarchy of theatrical genres. Rather than prioritizing language, he foregrounded gesture; rather than prioritizing script, he foregrounded performance. The elevation of the lowly pantomime to the status of “literature” suggests a literary type of upward mobility, and Nougaret knew for a fact that this goal was achievable.