ABSTRACT
This chapter charts the sentimentalization of stoicism and heroism in both the script and its performances by exploring the particular forms that Lucius Junius Brutus's emotional sensitivity takes in Voltaire's play. Consideration of the play's reception history before and during the Revolution, as well as its appropriation into political discourse and culture throughout the 1790's, serves to elucidate the mediating role theater played between classical example and contemporary history. Brutus came to represent the emotional price of modern citizenship and the painful sacrifices that Voltaire's play required. Jacques-Louis David's complex play of strong emotions and moral ideals was in keeping with the appeal to sentiment of French Enlightenment culture. The portrait of Brutus as virtuous citizen and suffering father can be viewed not only in the context of the shift toward a sentimental notion of virtue as heroic suffering, but also within the larger changes in the way that fathers and paternity were represented in latter half of eighteenth century.
