Hors la loi

THEATRE PROBABLY HAS A LOT TO DO WITH JUSTICE: just like on stage, in court characters play roles and argue their positions. An audience attends the hearing, as if it were a theatrical performance. It is therefore not surprising to find judicial types, subjects and situations in the repertoire, which sometimes transforms the stage into a forum in which to examine major societal issues, such as the right to abortion in the production by Pauline Bureau.

While Molière was the satirist of the medical profession, the judicial system also has its polemicist in the person of Racine: Les Plaideurs (The Litigants), the tragedian’s only comedy, depicts characters caught up in the frenzy of endless argument, whose only passion is quibbling and who even going so far as to organise the trial of a dog charged with stealing a capon. Following Racine, many comedies with evocative titles took up this theme, although with less brilliance it has to be said: L’Avocat sans étude by Rosimond (1680), L’Avocat patelin by Brueys (1706), and Les Plaideurs sans procès by Charles-Guillaume Étienne (1821).

In the same vein as Pauline Bureau’s production, which features lawyer Gisèle Halimi’s famous defence of her client Marie-Claire, who was being tried for having had an abortion (1972), other historical trials have been played out on the stage. The revolutionary period in particular inspired many texts and the Revolutionary Tribunal has been depicted many times. The plot of Victorien Sardou’s Thermidor (1891) is constructed around the Robespierre trial, reproducing some of the famous lines from the official ruling. The Revolutionary Tribunal is totally reconstructed in Saint-Georges de Bouhelier’s Le Sang de Danton (1931), dedicated to the famous orator of the title.
These plays, written with the benefit of hindsight, reconstruct a historical moment, which is not always the case with those produced contemporaneously to events or those with a political scope. The revolutionary period thus abounds in circumstantial texts. On a similar theme (the trial of nuns during the Revolution), one finds an appreciable difference in tone between Les Victimes cloîtrées, a drama by Jacques Marie Boutet de Monvel (1792) and Dialogues des carmélites by Georges Bernanos (1961).

One of the great court scenes in the Repertoire is undoubtedly the one that occurs in the third act of Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro (1784), which is a critique of seigneurial justice and the rights attached to it, such as jus primae noctis, as already addressed by Voltaire in Le Droit du seigneur in 1762. These plays, without mentioning famous trials and while remaining fictions, show abusive everyday practices and through the exemplarity of certain situations seek to denounce their effects. They therefore contribute to the evolution of society with regard to these practices.
The judicial, police and carceral worlds were more widely addressed by the theatre in the twentieth century to denounce aberrations, abuses and sometimes inequities.
Some authors practically made it their field of specialisation, such as Courteline (L’Article 330, Les Balances, Un Client sérieux, Le Commissaire est bon enfant, Le Gendarme est sans pitié) or Jean Genet (Le Balcon, Les Nègres, Haute surveillance, Les Paravents, Le Balcon).

Political questions resurfaced in the pivotal period of the Second World War. In Antigone, Jean Anouilh appropriated a great myth but unlike Sophocles, in his version the conflict is no longer between divine law and human law, but between the law of the State and that of the individual. Written in 1942, the play thus responded to French society’s qualms about the Occupation it was undergoing at the time. The post-war judicial system was for its part denounced in Marcel Aymé’s La Tête des autres (1952).

The inequity of justice can also inspire great humanist causes, as in Eugène Brieux’s La Robe rouge (1900), which depicts magistrates’ harassment of defendants of modest means, or Sartre’s La Putain respectueuse, which evokes a trumped-up trial against African-Americans in America in the 1930s. Pauline Bureau’s follows in this line of plays espousing major causes.
Indeed, some trials have been able to change attitudes and laws on crucial subjects, subjects which it seems important to speak of again today. Theatre has always been an effective means of publicising these issues.