The Actress and Utopian Theatre Reform in Eighteenth-Century France: Riccoboni, Rousseau, and Restif

Abstract

Three eighteenth-century writers, the actor Luigi Riccoboni, the philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the printer-pornographer Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, wrote antitheatrical or reform treatises identifying women as a significant source of ‘mortal poison’ in the theatre. Although Rousseau saw no way to purify or redeem the stage, the others proposed various bizarre reforms that would reduce or control the power of predatory female sexuality to seduce male audience members. These treatises reveal the depth of eighteenth-century misogyny during the so-called ‘reign of women’. Powerful women – and the stars of the Paris stage were powerful, economically independent, sexually liberated, and iconic – threatened male hegemony and provoked retaliation.