ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Denis Diderot's earlier sentimentalist concepts embodied in his influential notion of the tableau. Still relatively unexplored, however, remains the impact of Diderot's dramatic works and theory on theater during the French Revolution. Jacques-Louis David's vision shares Diderot's faith in the possibility of a collective moral rebirth through an aesthetic experience in which virtue and freedom would be mutually constructed and sustained. The prose tableaux discussed in the chapter illustrates the important participation of public discourse in sentimental modes and the creation of political communities, in imagination, through shared emotion. The chapter argues that the emotional participation of spectators in revolutionary tableaux came to serve as a means and model for political participation and contributed to codification of political engagement in affective and sentimental terms. Revolutionary tableaux in theater, journalism, oratory, painting, and festivals prescribed a new sociability in which the beliefs and morals of the private and the natural were joined with the political and patriotic.
