IN a 1999 production of Christoph Willibald Gluck's French version of Alceste (1776), conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner and theater director Robert Wilson offered an intriguing interpretation of Act 1 Scene 3: Although Gluck explicitly asked the priests and priestesses to perform a “pantomime” in this scene, nobody appeared onstage in Wilson's production; instead, Wilson sent a gigantic cube slowly spinning down onto the empty stage. Though solemn, refined, and breathtakingly beautiful, this scene prompts me to raise a question: What does it mean when the body is removed, or displaced by an object, in a pantomime?

Wilson's interpretation is disconcerting because it eliminates the body that is supposed to be onstage; it is not simply an issue of performance practice, for the body played an essential role in the relationship between acting and liberty in the Enlightenment. In the article “Pantomime,” in the Supplément à l’Encyclopédie (1776–77), Marmontel distinguished two types of actors: he criticized one as the “copyist of the poet,” while praising the pantomime actor: “Between the action of the actor and that of the pantomime there must be the difference between slavery and liberty.” By correlating an actor with enslavement and a pantomime with liberty, Marmontel made clear that a live performer was an important means through which audience members grasped the idea of liberty.

What makes Marmontel's thesis particularly relevant to the Enlightenment is not just that he published it in the supplement of the Encyclopédie, the greatest intellectual achievement of the Enlightenment, but also that he was a frequent participant in social gatherings hosted by Paul-Henri-Dietrich Thiry, baron d’Holbach, whose salon provided an intellectual hub of Enlightenment in Paris from around 1750 to 1780. Writers who frequented that space published a range of thoughts about liberty. D’Holbach's protege, Naigeon, attributed as the co-author of the article Liberty (Moral)” of the Encyclopédie (1765), proclaimed that “We are the masters of our homes, not as God is in the world, but as a wise prince is in his states, or a good father of the family is in his household.” By sharp contrast, d’Holbach himself denied, in Système de la nature (1770), that human beings are free: “Man is not free at any instant of his life. He is not master of his build that he takes from nature.