Diderot and the theatre: toward a secular church

This study reinterprets Denis Diderot's proposals for the transformation of the French classical stage as a vision of the theatre as a secular church. In this view, the theatre will become a place where the human need for transcendent experience can be expressed and channeled into the development of a body politic composed of citizen-critics. The active engagment of this reinvigorated audience in the process of community-building will serve to prevent the abuses of plitical and religious absolutism. Though Diderot's importance to the history of theatrical practice is widely appreciated, the relationship between his own religious training and his subsequent work has been largely ignored, possibly due to his reputation as one of the Enlightenment's most radical materialists. In this study, it is argued that when Diderot imagines a world where the church is replaced by the theatre and priests are replaced by actors, he is also proposing an alternative social structure where the body politic can fully experience strong emotion without devolving into fanaticism. Diderot saw the potential of the theatre to provide the opportunity for people to be movd by a feeling of transcendence, of an emotional experience of timelessness and oneness within a social framework that benefited both the individual and society without the attendant risks of coercion and repression associated with church and state that he believed inhibited rational thought in the individual and distorted the development of society as a whole. The present work thus presents a new reading of Diderot's well-known treatises on the theatre, Entretiens sur Le Fils naturel and De la poésie dramatique, which integrates Diderot's attempts to transform the classical stage with his political writings. It is suggested that these works can usefully be viewed as tutorials through which Diderot hopes to educate the theatre audience to become a congregation of critics able to engage in the collective evaluaturn of culture and politics,thereby creating a space where the pleasures of art and the duties of citizenship are joined.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Renée Troian