Eighteenth-Century Fiction 23, no. 1 (Fall 2010) © 2010 ECF ISSN 0840-6286 | E-ISSN 1911-0243 | DOI: 10.3138/ecf.23.1.61 abstract By examining various criticisms of Voltaire’s comedy L’Écossaise (1760), I explain how pamphlets and publication strategies altered dramatic performance. Instead of separating non-theatrical writing from dramatic texts, I underline how pamphlets emerged as part of the author’s construction of a “theatrical event.” During the cultural battles of the mid-eighteenth century, participants sought to “ready” their public by any discursive means possible. his persuasive activity began before the premiere of plays, which were also attempts to push the spectator into thinking congruently with the author of the work. Drawing on reviews from members of both the philosophe and anti- philosophe camps, I highlight the ambiguity between pamphlet and dramatic text, playwright and polemicist, performance and “set up,” and inally, iction writer and theatre critic. during the middle of the eighteenth century, and notably after the irst volumes of the Encyclopédie were published in 1749–50, the debate between France’s philosophes and members of a politically powerful counter-Enlightenment intensiied. Events such as the Cacouacs and the Pompignan afairs spawned a litany of polemical pamphlets, and epistemological or literary debates quickly degraded into nasty personal attacks. 1 As 1 “Cacouacs” was a derogatory name for the philosophes. During this afair (1758), the Abbé Moreau and Fougeret de Monbron attacked members of the Encyclopédie project, denouncing it as an “entreprise de subversion qui trahit les intérêts de la France et ruine les notions de famille, de patrie, de religion.” Cited in Maurice Descotes, Histoire de la critique dramatique en France (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1980), 140. For a more detailed description of counter-Enlightenment pamphlets during the late 1750s, see Olivier Ferret, La Fureur de nuire: Échanges pamphlétaires entre philosophes et antiphilosophes (1750–1770) (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2007), 289–92. he Pompignan afair refers to LeFranc de Pompignan’s malicious induction speech at the Académie Française (March 1759), in which the anti-philosophe criticized Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, and “la nouvelle philosophie.” I would like to thank Kate Jensen, Olivier Ferret, Pierre Frantz, Performing Criticism during Cultural War: The Case of Voltaire’s L’Écossaise (1760) Logan J. Connors Winner, Eighteenth-Century Fiction Graduate Essay Prize 2009