I began writing this book by asking myself a series of why-not questions: if Noverre linked pantomime to liberty, why not figure out how his thinking correlated with the discourse on liberty? If Gluck used ballet-pantomime in his French operas, why not survey a history of operas in pre-Revolutionary France that included the element of pantomime? If Garrick and Gluck made a case for a natural style of human expression, why not figure out why the social circle hosted by d’Holbach welcomed Garrick when he was in Paris? If the philosophes – Condillac, Rousseau, and Diderot – thought deeply about signs, why not trace their thinking to Dubos, who wrote extensively about signs and pantomime in his Réflexions critiques? If Dubos was an important figure in the discourse on signs, why not use his ideas as the foundation of an argument, working outward toward the music/dance/theater culture in France? If the discourse on pantomime was a phenomenon in the intellectual movement of the Enlightenment, why not investigate its impact on the early years of the French Revolution, when Article 11 of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen de 1789 explicitly protected freedom of communication?

My answers to these why-not questions have shaped this book, which brings together aesthetics, music history, and intellectual history. Consequently I have discovered that, on the most basic level, pantomime was a designation, one that indicated a dance style. This style had long been used in French opera, as Harris-Warrick has demonstrated, without the designation of “pantomime.” But the consistent uses of this designation in the eighteenth century – in operas as well as in writings about dance, theater, and opera – signaled a kind of revival of ancient Roman pantomime in modern theater, which, as Edelstein argues, was a key characteristic of the Enlightenment. My argument is that pantomime was not simply a style in music and dance history; rather, writers including Dubos, d’Alembert, Condillac, Rousseau, Diderot, Jaucourt, and Marmontel built a critical framework that placed the cultural phenomenon of pantomime within the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment.