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.

IN the prologue of his pastorale-héroϊque Isbé (libretto by Henri-François, marquis de La Riviere; Opera, 1742), composer Jean-Joseph de Mondonville did something thought-provoking: he presented the pantomime dance as a threat to la belle danse. Set at the Tuileries garden of Paris, the prologue begins with Lust (Volupté), who finds a bizarre nymph named Fashion (La Mode) threatening and turns to Amour, God of the Universe, for help. Instead of presenting Fashion as a charismatic character, Mondonville features her as an intrusive person, whose caprice, whose inconstancy, whose “weak pleasures” win over everyone. As Lust complains to Amour, “all the hearts in these places refuse to pay homage to you” (tous les coeurs en ces lieux te refusent l’hommage). To highlight Fashion as an intrusion, Mondonville introduced Italian characteristics that adulterated the French musical tradition. Take the French overture as an example. Instead of following tradition, by writing the second part as a fast section with imitative counterpoint, Mondonville wrote a section with Italianate stylistic features: a melodic sequence, chains of suspensions, unison writing, and a chromatic lament (Example 1.1). This unconventional, “Italianate” French overture set the stage for another unconventional element: a prelude featuring a chromatic ascending melody and invertible counterpoint that accompanies Fashion's entrance. After the prelude, Mondonville wrote yet another unconventional dance called “pantomime,” followed by another dance in the same key marked “lively” (gay). Both were performed by five dancers called “Pantomimes,” a group distinct from Amour's followers, Games (jeux) and Pleasures (plaisirs). Amour dislikes the “bizarre concerts” that accompany those pantomime dances, preferring instead the “sweet concerts” that are graceful and pleasurable. By the end of the prologue, the opposition is clear: Fashion brings forth “turbulent pleasures” so unsettling, the bizarre concerts so unjustified by Apollo, and a power over mortals so dominant that Amour leaves Paris for the fantastical land of Lignon. Granted, whether Apollo represents Louis XIV or not needs justification, Buford Norman cautions, but Voltaire did mention in Anecdotes sur Louis XIV (1748) that Louis XIV danced in some ballets as Apollo. In any case, the chorus rejoices in Amour's departure in the prologue of Isbé, singing: “Amour gives up victory to us” (L’Amour nous cède la victoire).

ON October 1, 1776 Noverre made a point about liberty in his ballet-pantomime Apelles et Campaspe, ou La Générosité d’Alexandre (Paris, Academie Royale de Musique). The plot is about the ancient Greek painter Apelles, who becomes infatuated with Campaspe, one of the favourite mistresses of Alexander the Great, while painting her portrait. Campaspe sits for Apelles, who pictures her variously as the belligerent Pallas, the bucolic Flore, and the enamored Diane who falls in love with Endymion – until he finally decides to paint Campaspe as Venus, the mother of love. Apelles then rushes to the canvas and attempts to paint but he is too aroused to hold his brushes. At one point, the intimacy between the painter and the sitter builds up. Apelles dismisses his attendants, walks towards Campaspe, and lets her know that he loves her. His behaviors touch Campaspe, who promptly falls in love with him, even at the risk of offending Alexander the Great. Here comes Noverre's point: “She prefers liberty to grandeur and … the gift of Apelles's hand will be more valuable to her than Alexander the Great's throne.”

Thus Noverre illustrated the process through which Campaspe seeks out liberty for herself in light of Apelles's action. Cahusac explained this impact in the article “Enthusiasm” of the Encyclopédie (1755). Enthusiasm is a kind of fury (fureur) possessed by a man of genius. During an exquisite performance, superb actors could affect the audience and be affected by their reactions. This reciprocal interaction between actors and their audience was initiated by what Cahusac called “enthusiasm,” as mentioned in Chapter Three. “It is enthusiasm that makes one feel; it augments by degrees. It passes from the soul of the actors to that of the spectators, and note that as the spectators are aroused, the performance of the actors becomes more animated.” Cahusac's idea of enthusiasm explains the love felt by Apelles and Campaspe: a sentiment is deliberately suppressed by Apelles, revealed nonetheless by his basic reflexes, noticed by a keenly observant Campaspe, and felt by her. But Cahusac did not explain why motion is linked to the idea of freedom.

IN the last chapter I discussed how the composers Mondonville, Couperin, Rameau, and others used pantomime in their musical compositions. In this chapter I turn to another composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was also a music theorist and a philosopher. Rameau and Rousseau often appear side-by-side in studies of eighteenth-century French music, not only because Rousseau composed Les Fêtes de Ramire, but also because they debated on many important musical topics – most famously the theoretical relationships between harmony and melody. Yet, despite copious studies on Rameau's dances and Rousseau's pantomimes, Rousseau's thoughts on dance are not fully understood. Like Rameau, Rousseau was interested in pantomime as a type of dance that could expand the expressive range of dance. Like Rameau, Rousseau thought about la belle danse in the civilizing process. Yet, unlike Rameau, who used pantomime to explore the idea of artists’ freedom that could be illustrated in performance, Rousseau used pantomime to explore spectators’ moral liberty when they responded to a stimulating performance. In other words, while Rameau focused on text and its effect on performance, Rousseau, fully aware of the significance of his text, emphasized the issue of reception of an effective performance at the theater. In his intermède called Le Devin du village of 1753, which was a great operatic phenomenon in late eighteenth-century France, Rousseau found a way for spectators to recognize their moral liberty through watching, interpreting, and sharing the content of pantomime among themselves. This chapter is about how he made this discovery.

Le Devin du village consists of three characters: a village couple called Colin and Colette, and a fortune teller called the Soothsayer (Le Devin). We will begin our discussion with fortune telling, known in the eighteenth century as “soothsaying.”

What did soothsaying mean in the Enlightenment? It might be unsurprising that soothsaying was rationalized in the Enlightenment as a useful skill (similar to what we now call “counselling,” “informed prediction,” or “educated guess”) rather than a mystical practice but, surprisingly, Rousseau retained some mystique surrounding this term. In the Encyclopédie Louis de Jaucourt identified two types of fortune tellers – prophets and soothsayers – and defined them as folks good at making predictions about the future. Although both types could predict events that were yet to take place, Jaucourt explained that none of them in fact possessed any real supernatural power.

Music and dance share many properties – both are nonverbal, both are ephemeral – but one key difference between them is that western art music was more readily notated than dance. This fundamental difference bridges text and performance and presents, for composers who know their craft well, a challenge as much as an opportunity to think about how best to write dance music, or music that accompanies actors’ movements. Some composers begin with simple mimicry, depicting a gesture through music by composing, for example, an ascending melody for a dancer who raises her arm; but other composers go beyond this basic level of mimicry and establish more sophisticated relationships between music and motion. This book is an examination of how composers came up with musical ideas based on movement. In more concrete terms, I examine how composers in eighteenth-century France – especially Paris – wrote music that accompanied motion. My argument contributes to a growing corpus of literature on music and the body, or what Elisabeth Le Guin calls “carnal musicology.”

Composers active in eighteenth-century France were fascinated by foreign dancers – those from England and Italy, in particular – who incorporated the element of pantomime in their performances, and they processed this fascination by composing music that captured the effects of these dances. Many did not try to translate dancers’ movements into music, but many recreated the most salient properties of these performances – precision, agility, sentimentality – through music. The kind of thinking across the mediums of music, gesture, and language was not new, for French composers had, since the early eighteenth century, created instrumental character pieces, some with suggestive titles, that portrayed all sorts of subjects: individuals, objects, animals, or natural phenomena. What was new around the second half of the eighteenth century was that composers deliberately represented performers’ ephemeral bodily movements through the more durable medium of notated music. In this book I argue that they used their agency – known generally as “moral liberty” in the Enlightenment – in three major ways: 1) they composed music for pantomime without following existing dance conventions; 2) their music heightened performers’ awareness of their moral liberty during performances; 3) pantomime performances stimulated spectators to recognize themselves as thinkers of liberty.

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.

IN a 1999 production of Christoph Willibald Gluck's French version of Alceste (1776), conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner and theater director Robert Wilson offered an intriguing interpretation of Act 1 Scene 3: Although Gluck explicitly asked the priests and priestesses to perform a “pantomime” in this scene, nobody appeared onstage in Wilson's production; instead, Wilson sent a gigantic cube slowly spinning down onto the empty stage. Though solemn, refined, and breathtakingly beautiful, this scene prompts me to raise a question: What does it mean when the body is removed, or displaced by an object, in a pantomime?

Wilson's interpretation is disconcerting because it eliminates the body that is supposed to be onstage; it is not simply an issue of performance practice, for the body played an essential role in the relationship between acting and liberty in the Enlightenment. In the article “Pantomime,” in the Supplément à l’Encyclopédie (1776–77), Marmontel distinguished two types of actors: he criticized one as the “copyist of the poet,” while praising the pantomime actor: “Between the action of the actor and that of the pantomime there must be the difference between slavery and liberty.” By correlating an actor with enslavement and a pantomime with liberty, Marmontel made clear that a live performer was an important means through which audience members grasped the idea of liberty.

What makes Marmontel's thesis particularly relevant to the Enlightenment is not just that he published it in the supplement of the Encyclopédie, the greatest intellectual achievement of the Enlightenment, but also that he was a frequent participant in social gatherings hosted by Paul-Henri-Dietrich Thiry, baron d’Holbach, whose salon provided an intellectual hub of Enlightenment in Paris from around 1750 to 1780. Writers who frequented that space published a range of thoughts about liberty. D’Holbach's protege, Naigeon, attributed as the co-author of the article Liberty (Moral)” of the Encyclopédie (1765), proclaimed that “We are the masters of our homes, not as God is in the world, but as a wise prince is in his states, or a good father of the family is in his household.” By sharp contrast, d’Holbach himself denied, in Système de la nature (1770), that human beings are free: “Man is not free at any instant of his life. He is not master of his build that he takes from nature.

Right after Louis XVI was guillotined at the Place de la Revolution, at about 10 a.m. on January 21, 1793, Louis XIV's confessor, the Irish-born priest abbe Henri Essex Edgeworth de Firmont, saw one of the executioners – a teenager no older than eighteen – grab the late king's severed head and walk it ceremonially around the scaffold, showing it to the spectators as he let out “the most dreadful cries” (des cris les plus atroces) and made “the most indecent gestures” (des gestes les plus indécents). The teenager did not say a word, let alone present a coherent speech. His expressions of enthusiasm contrasted sharply with the grandiloquence valued by the Immortals of the Academie francaise and violated codes of civility practiced in the Old Regime. But they worked. After a moment of gloomy silence, some spectators exclaimed: “Vive la république!” (Long Live the Republic!) Thousands of spectators joined in, throwing their hats in the air in celebration of the death of Louis XVI.

The execution was much like a scene in a play. The young guard demonstrated his “moral liberty” (la liberté morale), defined in the Encyclopédie as a liberty that “resides in the power that an intelligent being has to do what he wants, according to his own determination” – when he expressed himself by nonverbal cries and gestures. In this instance, his expression of moral liberty had political implications, for he exercised his natural right to express himself, a right articulated in Article 11 of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen de 1789. Here is Keith Michael Baker's 1987 English translation of it: “The free expression [libre communication] of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: thus every citizen may freely speak, write, and print, subject to accountability for abuse of this freedom in the cases determined by law.”

There was nothing special about an executioner getting excited after guillotining a notable criminal in public, but what made Louis XVI's death noteworthy was that the young guard's histrionics were grounded in Enlightenment ideas about the origins of language. Screams exemplified the “cry of nature” (le cri de la nature), defined by Rousseau in the Second Discourse (1755) as “man's first language, the most universal, most energetic, and only language he needed before it was necessary to persuade assembled men.”