Letter in Alembert on the spectacles
© INCOPROM SA Geneva
In the article “Geneva” of the Encyclopedia, of Alembert considered it regrettable that this flourishing city did not have a theater. Rousseau answers him in September 1758 in a text whose title even opposes the modesty of the citizen to the bay-trees of the encyclopedist: J. - J. Rousseau citizen of Geneva with Mr. d' Alembert, the French Academy, the Academy Royal of Sciences of Paris, that of Prussia, the Royal Company of London, the Royal Academy of the Humanities of Sweden, and the Institute of Bologna, on its Geneva article.
Rousseau establishes that the theater, like all the spectacles, never shows the things such as they are, but such as it likes the public to see them. The analysis of the Misanthropist shows thus that the concern of the expert workman is never to reform manners, but to take effect.
The theater is thus irreformable, no matter what Diderot thinks about it: in the comic kind, one never laughs at the defects but only at the virtues.
This remarkable comment of the work of Molière falls under a more general reflection on the importance of the public opinion, than the government must know to handle without resorting to the laws: “By where the government can it thus have taken on manners? I answer that it is by the public opinion”.
The example of the theater attests that the changes of the opinion are of an extreme importance in a virtuous State, so that the risk should not be taken to introduce in Geneva the pleasures of the Parisian scenes.